"The isolationism and disinterest of hobbits in the world at large is not depicted as a virtue..."
Bullshit.
"nor is fear and distrust of the elites (the elves and Gandalf) which is characteristic of most hobbits."
Double bullshit. Look what happened to the elite Saruman and Wormtongue. Nor is fear and distrust of the Elves and Gandalf "characteristic of most hobbits."
"The refrain you hear over and over is "I want my country back." Can you imagine *Frodo* saying such a thing? "
You need to reread the penultimate chapter of "The Return of the King": "The Scouring of the Shire". Frodo not only wanted his country back, but fought a battle to get it, and won.
The practical difference between the Hobbits of the Fellowship and the Tea Party is the former's willingness to actually use deadly force to expel the enemy and the latter's being co-opted as a mere tool of media manipulation.
If by moderate you mean a warmongering torturers' accomplice who prosecutes whistle-blowers, spies on Americans without warrants, kills lotsa brown babies, and gives trillions of dollars of taxpayer money to financial industry parasites. Yeah, I guess that is moderate for a republican these days.
I grew up mostly in Texas, but I didn't realize just how huge the Texas economy had gotten. Over $1.2 trillion. More than half the size of Russia, France or Great Britain. Nearly as big as Canada or South Korea. Bigger than all of Scandinavia combined, with enough left over for Ireland. Bigger than the bottom 90 sovereign nations combined (that's Bolivia and below).
The top rate is meaningless, particularly without mentioning what it actually applies to - what are the exemptions, what are the lower rates, what levels do they kick in, are they counting the "employer's side" of payroll taxes, etc. The meaningful number is what is the actual percent paid of profits. And even that can be gamed by adjusting executive salaries, perks, offshore entities, depreciation scams, etc. US corporations pay very little tax.
For 2009, for instance (latest available) the total federal corporate income tax receipts were only $225,482M vs. $858,164M in payroll taxes, the latter of which were paid disproportionately by people who has moderate to low incomes (and which directly more than paid for those social programs which right-wing idiots claim are going to bankrupt the country, but which in fact have a surplus which finances the deficit in rest of the budget, including all that corporate welfare, pork for weapons and mercenaries sold by the right wingers' firms, and those tax breaks for the rich, and which also take a good deal of the pension and healthcare burden off employers.)
On top of payroll taxes, individual federal tax receipts were over 5 times corporate receipts.
The state rates are even more meaningless, as it is easy to choose a state which not only has no income tax, but which for any large venture will abate property taxes and give other incentives.
The IRS reports that corporations after deducting:
Cost of goods sold
Compensation of officers
Salaries and wages
Repairs
Bad debts
Rent paid on business property
Taxes paid
Interest paid
Amortization
Depreciation
Depletion
Advertising
Pension, profit-sharing, stock, annuity
Employee benefit programs and
Net loss, noncapital assets from the $6,126B in total receipts (nearly all by corporations with over $250M in yearly receipts)
AFTER deducting all that, the " Other deductions" category ALONE was over $612B in 2008 - almost as big as salaries and wages,($618B), more than twice as big as total claimed net corporate income (if we leave out rent income - $302B, if we also leave out portfolio income, $240B) .
Big corporations are all cheating on their taxes, and big corporations own the economy, the workers, the media and the politicians. Yet the individual middle and lower income taxpayer is somehow supposed to pay more because the corporations and their rich management won't pay their share, even though the taxpayer doesn't have a job anymore because the corporation sent it overseas.
Remind me again why the public has to grant these freeloading traitors corporate charters?
"Sure, if federal grants went away and the states had to fend for themselves, places like New York or California would just up the state tax rate by a few percent (after much political wrangling, no doubt) and be fine. Most people in those states would probably see little or no difference in their overall (state and federal combined) tax burdens, some might even see it lower. Places like Montana and Alaska would have a serious problem. "
Well, the ones that get more from the feds than they pay are mostly places like Alabama, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi and West Virginia. All the most populous states - California, New York, Illinois, Texas, even Florida pay more to the feds than they get. Some of the low-population western states such as Nevada and Wyoming don't break even, or only barely. Others such as the Dakotas, Idaho and Montana get more than they put in. Alaska has gotten more and more over the years - it wasn't breaking even on taxes in the early '80s, now they get $1.84/$. New Mexico would have a problem, as it gets about double what it puts in. The problem is that most expenditures are for salaries one way or another - Los Alamos workers in New Mexico, for instance. So even if the direct aid to the states were cut off, the apportionment of federal spending among the states would not change that much in most cases.
But because it's not sealed and it's being inserted, removed, handled, used as a coaster and whatnot, the optical disk will be at least a hundred times more likely to be damaged, with no chance of recovery. It's much slower than a hard disk, too.
That's the audiophile ur-myth. You can hardly hear anything over 10kHz, even with good, young ears, and virtually all of that is hiss and cymbals. Sure, 96kHz is a little better with phase and nuances, but only a little. (And most phase matters not at all.) The sampling noise at 16bits is not audible (higher bits give more headroom, not less audible noise), and the corners are shaved off anyway by the low-pass filter and the ears' frequency response. "Harsh" highs are a factor mostly of more accuracy and a flatter high frequency response than is comfortable, but partially of odd-order harmonic distortion which is more a factor of bad filters or amplifier design than of the CD medium. The sound stage has more to do with phase relationships from the mid-range to 10kHz than in the top octave, and that usually gets erased by bad recording, bad mastering and inadequate (overly directional) speakers.
The truth is, there is a certain kind of gross distortion vinyl and tube "audiophiles" like, and the CD isn't giving it to you. Run a CD through an analog RIAA equalization and back and a tube amp (even after a decent solid state stage or two), match levels, add a bit of hiss, crackle and pop and you won't reliably be able to tell the difference in a blinded test between that and vinyl. If we use very clean vinyl, correct its distorted EQ and run it through an all solid-state amp, you'd get it wrong nearly every time trying to guess which is the CD when comparing with the system above.
Re: cigarettes. Nat Shermans are not a good example. They're dry, and not very good tobacco IMO. For a good pre-rolled cigarette, the Davidoff Magnums are (were?) in a different league. Dunhill Internationals are pretty good, though they used to be better. The old Three Castles rolling tobacco was far better than anything else - it was like blond hair. It hasn't been available for a long while but there are some imitations out there. Even Bugler rolling tobacco is far better than anything you can get in a regular pre-rolled cigarette, and it''s cheaper, too. American Spirit has some good rolling tobacco, it's worth trying the perique, but as a regular thing it's not really worth the extra price over Bugler .
On the other end of the taste spectrum, were the old Balkan Sobranie tobaccos. The unfiltered cigarettes came ten to metal tin and smelled something like burning goat dung (100% Turkish tobacco strains). The pipe tobacco was exactly what a pipe should smell like. Both still sadly unavailable since the last Balkan war, though there are alleged replicas of the pipe tobacco.
It doesn't matter if every component is great if they don't work well together.
My dad in the late '70s had: a Nakamichi casette deck, Linn turntable, Technics (IIRC) receiver, dual Ampzillas, Magnaplanar speakers, and a 12" subwoofer with custom crossover and a professionally balanced (with a calibrated microphone and frequency analyzer) parametric EQ. It sounded barely OK. Why? I blame the Magnaplanars and to a lesser extent the Ampzillas, but mostly the components just didn't work well together.
On the other hand, a few years ago, comparing a $5000 solid state system to a $40,000 tube system (both playing at the same monitored level through the same $1000ea. Linn bookshelf speakers) it was like night and day, it was as if two extra musicians had joined in. Sometimes the differences are profound even when the cheaper system would likely test better (or at least practically perfect as far as the numbers go) and the more expensive system likely had more measurable distortion, the extra money can buy a dramatically better experience if spent wisely.
(OTOH the $25,000 ea. speakers sounded lousy. Caveat auditor.)
A little bit fancier way is to use CAT5 cable the same way. Or use 3 cables and braid them rather than twisting. Nylon braid instead of heat-shrink tubing also works well (with a few inches of heat-shrink on either end to hold it together and provide some strain relief). Old-style computer ribbon cable with alternate wires connected at either end (conductor A = wire 0,2,4,6...; conductor B = wire 1,3,5,7...) also works great and allows running behind baseboards or under carpets.
Frequency issues might be switching power supply or digital noise leaking into the signal path, or microphonic feedback of the sound to the signal path when high impedance inputs are used inside the circuit, particularly if they are left floating. Digital stuff can easily pollute the power supply inside a component if some care isn't taken - not hard, and most components have great PSRR, but some old-school discrete designs that have been reused won't deal as well with a dirty power supply. Cheap capacitors in the signal path can also cause gross changes in the frequency response, especially with heating and aging. Even good caps used as DC-blocking will give some soakage (turn into electrets) and thus start turning sine waves asymmetric, but only after many hours of use. Paper speaker cones - shudder!
Yes, the sound setup core may be the same, but if people are constantly hooking up instruments and microphones and making input adjustments, all sorts of things can happen. Worn or corroded jacks, cords, pots, switches etc. can screw things up terribly; ESD and input overloads can have an immediate or cumulative effect on all sorts of things, new electrical stuff not even hooked up to the sound system can cause interference. And it's rare for one person to have complete 24-7 control over a venue setup. Some idiot might mess with practically anything when you're not looking. It always works just fine - until it breaks - so sound engineers really need to document what should be there, how it's supposed to be hooked up, how it is supposed to perform and make sure that it's all still working right before every performance.
Op-amps come in thousands of flavors, they each have hundreds of performance parameters, at least half a dozen of which need to be considered even in a first-pass design. Common types of op-amps in low-power signal paths are usually much better than transistors even when given 1/10th the component count and 1/10th the design effort of a discrete circuit. Used by a real expert, they can do things that couldn't be done at all with discrete circuits.
The problem is that many engineers simply don't pay attention to any of the important characteristics of the components, drop in a '741 or TL072, use a cookbook circuit, don't even bother to model the circuit (or don't model the actual devices they are using or the relevant circuit response measures), and don't fully test the real circuit. Heat? Details of the character of harmonic distortion? Error budgets? Phase margin? Noise? It's all a mystery to these analog script kiddies who can't use 4/5 of their SPICE simulator and may never have melted a bit of solder (except maybe by mistaking amps for milliamps.)
No, there is a relationship between cranial volume and intelligence. It can be confounded by several other factors, (e.g. hydrocephalus, white vs. gray matter, cortical area, body size) which weaken the correlation, but it is real.
A real passion for learning is the kiss of death to a college GPA. 99.99995% of the knowledge in the library has no bearing on your next set of midterms or finals. Pursuing any of that other knowledge will actually hurt your grades. Even if it is related, if it disagrees with your professors opinions, knowing it could hurt your grades. The grades you get also have little to do with how much you know about the course topic, less to do with what you'll actually be able to remember in ten years, still less with your ability to think about it, nothing to do with your ability to apply it, and a negative amount to do with your ability to innovate in the field. College diplomas are certificates of conformity, nothing more. The process of getting them actually damages competence and creative ability in many ways.
The point is to be flexible - if you are open to learning, to experimenting, then as you work on a project you will discover better goals than the one you originally set out to reach. If you see a better goal along the way than the one you set out to reach, then change the goal. Changing the goal will mean throwing out all your schedules and project planning. But continuing on to the wrong goal just because you have invested a lot of time in a detailed plan for how to get there is dumb.
What? Iraq attacked Iran. Iran fought Iraq to a standstill. The cost was horrific, but Iran won - Iraq did not gain territory. Iran learned from that lesson. They will still take unlimited casualties if they have to in order to defend their borders, but they will not be using human wave assaults again. They are geared up and trained for a guerrilla defense this time, and are likely better prepared to defend against airstrikes than any nation we have faced in a hot war since Germany.
Oh, and a full scale assault on Iran will close the Straits of Hormuz and send oil to well over $200, which will lead directly to a depression, which we won't be able to spend out way out of as we have tried to do from 2008 to the present. Syria will back up Iran, Russia and China won't likely be on our side, our NATO buddies are busy in Libya (and will be even less enthusiastic than they were about going into Iraq), the incompetent Saudis will join in and get their noses bloodied despite all the fancy planes we sold them, Venezuela will cut off oil imports to the US, Hezbollah will go after Israel (after Israel starts more shit on the border even than usual) and we'll be lucky if the nukes don't start flying. We're talking WW III here. Messing with Iran should not be on our dance card, no matter how big a boner Netanyahu has to go in. (He's going to try in September, is the rumor. How he expects to get over Iraq, I don't know. Bush wouldn't let him. Maybe Obama will be more pliant.)
"To think that your average Marine or Solider can't think or be creative is an insult."
True, true. One of the smartest people at the regional phone company top-level DSL tech support, with direct control over literally millions of circuits and tens of thousands of optical switches, had spent a 20-year hitch enlisted in the Army motor pool. The thing is, intelligence and creativity are usually actively punished by the system, especially if there is already a defined process that is being modified or ignored, and that's true whether in the military or the phone company. The better managers and officers know when to look the other way, but most of them are by-the-book or social/ office-politics types who don't fully respect their subordinates' knowledge and ability. Regardless of the individual abilities and personalities up and down the chain, the organization as a whole has an inertia and a resistance to initiative, creativity and just plain common sense that no individual can do much about.
The problem is that after being slapped down a few times, the smart ones give up or get out, and the organization's overall ability falls a bit every time.
See: http://bigip-blogs-adc.oracle.com/brendan/entry/test for more about ARC, L2ARC, using SSDs with ZFS. With 128GB RAM, 550GB of SSDs, and 18TB of disk, the speedup was 8.4x over just the RAM and disks, with 20x less latency. YMMV with different workloads.
Number 1 thing would be more / bigger network links. I think this has used all its PCIe slots, so you might have to cut the capacity by 1/3 to put in a bigger network card - say a 4x Gigabit Ethernet card (cheap) or a 10gig card (more expensive, plus need the 10gig port to hook it to). Or get a motherboard with more slots.
More speculatively: More RAM might help if you can set it up to cache the right things. Faster drives would help the IOPS (lower latency) but the bandwidth bottleneck is going to be the network. You'll likely want two or three of these boxes for redundancy and backup, too. (Plus spares of everything.) Or maybe a big tape loader, but at this scale I think whole-server redundancy is a lot less trouble. (Your backup will weigh ~145lbs, though.)
ZFS is likely a more reliable good way to go than RAID, though some think it's too new. If you add some SSDs, you can get better system response, too: "ZFS also supports both read and write caching, for which special devices can be used. Solid State Devices can be used for the L2ARC, or Level 2 adaptive replacement cache, speeding up read operations, while NVRAM buffered SLC memory can be boosted with supercapacitors to implement a fast, non-volatile write cache, improving synchronous writes. Finally, when mirroring, block devices can be grouped according to physical chassis, so that the filesystem can continue in the case of the failure of an entire chassis."- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZFS
With a lot of RAM, mostly set up as a disk, a UPS, (and a shutdown script running on line power loss, of course) the write caching could likely be implemented more inexpensively than the SLC solution. It isn't that big a perceived performance increase on most systems, though, and adds some risk. Regular MLC SSD read caching with L2ARC can make the system far more responsive at very little cost, and with no reliability concerns if ZFS is set up correctly.
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"The isolationism and disinterest of hobbits in the world at large is not depicted as a virtue..."
Bullshit.
"nor is fear and distrust of the elites (the elves and Gandalf) which is characteristic of most hobbits."
Double bullshit. Look what happened to the elite Saruman and Wormtongue. Nor is fear and distrust of the Elves and Gandalf "characteristic of most hobbits."
"The refrain you hear over and over is "I want my country back." Can you imagine *Frodo* saying such a thing? "
You need to reread the penultimate chapter of "The Return of the King": "The Scouring of the Shire". Frodo not only wanted his country back, but fought a battle to get it, and won.
The practical difference between the Hobbits of the Fellowship and the Tea Party is the former's willingness to actually use deadly force to expel the enemy and the latter's being co-opted as a mere tool of media manipulation.
If by moderate you mean a warmongering torturers' accomplice who prosecutes whistle-blowers, spies on Americans without warrants, kills lotsa brown babies, and gives trillions of dollars of taxpayer money to financial industry parasites. Yeah, I guess that is moderate for a republican these days.
When was Obama ever "far left" or even "center"? He's G.W. Bush's third term.
(Also your 2nd paragraph is so illiterate as to be incomprehensible.)
I grew up mostly in Texas, but I didn't realize just how huge the Texas economy had gotten. Over $1.2 trillion. More than half the size of Russia, France or Great Britain. Nearly as big as Canada or South Korea. Bigger than all of Scandinavia combined, with enough left over for Ireland. Bigger than the bottom 90 sovereign nations combined (that's Bolivia and below).
The top rate is meaningless, particularly without mentioning what it actually applies to - what are the exemptions, what are the lower rates, what levels do they kick in, are they counting the "employer's side" of payroll taxes, etc. The meaningful number is what is the actual percent paid of profits. And even that can be gamed by adjusting executive salaries, perks, offshore entities, depreciation scams, etc. US corporations pay very little tax.
For 2009, for instance (latest available) the total federal corporate income tax receipts were only $225,482M vs. $858,164M in payroll taxes, the latter of which were paid disproportionately by people who has moderate to low incomes (and which directly more than paid for those social programs which right-wing idiots claim are going to bankrupt the country, but which in fact have a surplus which finances the deficit in rest of the budget, including all that corporate welfare, pork for weapons and mercenaries sold by the right wingers' firms, and those tax breaks for the rich, and which also take a good deal of the pension and healthcare burden off employers.)
On top of payroll taxes, individual federal tax receipts were over 5 times corporate receipts.
The state rates are even more meaningless, as it is easy to choose a state which not only has no income tax, but which for any large venture will abate property taxes and give other incentives.
The IRS reports that corporations after deducting:
Cost of goods sold
Compensation of officers
Salaries and wages
Repairs
Bad debts
Rent paid on business property
Taxes paid
Interest paid
Amortization
Depreciation
Depletion
Advertising
Pension, profit-sharing, stock, annuity
Employee benefit programs and
Net loss, noncapital assets
from the $6,126B in total receipts (nearly all by corporations with over $250M in yearly receipts)
AFTER deducting all that, the " Other deductions" category ALONE was over $612B in 2008 - almost as big as salaries and wages,($618B), more than twice as big as total claimed net corporate income (if we leave out rent income - $302B, if we also leave out portfolio income, $240B) .
Big corporations are all cheating on their taxes, and big corporations own the economy, the workers, the media and the politicians. Yet the individual middle and lower income taxpayer is somehow supposed to pay more because the corporations and their rich management won't pay their share, even though the taxpayer doesn't have a job anymore because the corporation sent it overseas.
Remind me again why the public has to grant these freeloading traitors corporate charters?
"Sure, if federal grants went away and the states had to fend for themselves, places like New York or California would just up the state tax rate by a few percent (after much political wrangling, no doubt) and be fine. Most people in those states would probably see little or no difference in their overall (state and federal combined) tax burdens, some might even see it lower. Places like Montana and Alaska would have a serious problem. "
Well, the ones that get more from the feds than they pay are mostly places like Alabama, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi and West Virginia. All the most populous states - California, New York, Illinois, Texas, even Florida pay more to the feds than they get. Some of the low-population western states such as Nevada and Wyoming don't break even, or only barely. Others such as the Dakotas, Idaho and Montana get more than they put in. Alaska has gotten more and more over the years - it wasn't breaking even on taxes in the early '80s, now they get $1.84/$. New Mexico would have a problem, as it gets about double what it puts in. The problem is that most expenditures are for salaries one way or another - Los Alamos workers in New Mexico, for instance. So even if the direct aid to the states were cut off, the apportionment of federal spending among the states would not change that much in most cases.
See: Federal Taxes Paid vs. Federal Spending Received by State, 1981-2005
But because it's not sealed and it's being inserted, removed, handled, used as a coaster and whatnot, the optical disk will be at least a hundred times more likely to be damaged, with no chance of recovery. It's much slower than a hard disk, too.
That's the audiophile ur-myth.
You can hardly hear anything over 10kHz, even with good, young ears, and virtually all of that is hiss and cymbals. Sure, 96kHz is a little better with phase and nuances, but only a little. (And most phase matters not at all.) The sampling noise at 16bits is not audible (higher bits give more headroom, not less audible noise), and the corners are shaved off anyway by the low-pass filter and the ears' frequency response. "Harsh" highs are a factor mostly of more accuracy and a flatter high frequency response than is comfortable, but partially of odd-order harmonic distortion which is more a factor of bad filters or amplifier design than of the CD medium. The sound stage has more to do with phase relationships from the mid-range to 10kHz than in the top octave, and that usually gets erased by bad recording, bad mastering and inadequate (overly directional) speakers.
The truth is, there is a certain kind of gross distortion vinyl and tube "audiophiles" like, and the CD isn't giving it to you. Run a CD through an analog RIAA equalization and back and a tube amp (even after a decent solid state stage or two), match levels, add a bit of hiss, crackle and pop and you won't reliably be able to tell the difference in a blinded test between that and vinyl. If we use very clean vinyl, correct its distorted EQ and run it through an all solid-state amp, you'd get it wrong nearly every time trying to guess which is the CD when comparing with the system above.
Re: cigarettes.
Nat Shermans are not a good example. They're dry, and not very good tobacco IMO. For a good pre-rolled cigarette, the Davidoff Magnums are (were?) in a different league. Dunhill Internationals are pretty good, though they used to be better. The old Three Castles rolling tobacco was far better than anything else - it was like blond hair. It hasn't been available for a long while but there are some imitations out there. Even Bugler rolling tobacco is far better than anything you can get in a regular pre-rolled cigarette, and it''s cheaper, too. American Spirit has some good rolling tobacco, it's worth trying the perique, but as a regular thing it's not really worth the extra price over Bugler .
On the other end of the taste spectrum, were the old Balkan Sobranie tobaccos. The unfiltered cigarettes came ten to metal tin and smelled something like burning goat dung (100% Turkish tobacco strains). The pipe tobacco was exactly what a pipe should smell like. Both still sadly unavailable since the last Balkan war, though there are alleged replicas of the pipe tobacco.
The original price was 100 times the cost. (About 2x what it should have been.)
This. And closed-loop servo speakers. And a built-in facility for room balancing, with an included microphone.
It doesn't matter if every component is great if they don't work well together.
My dad in the late '70s had: a Nakamichi casette deck, Linn turntable, Technics (IIRC) receiver, dual Ampzillas, Magnaplanar speakers, and a 12" subwoofer with custom crossover and a professionally balanced (with a calibrated microphone and frequency analyzer) parametric EQ. It sounded barely OK. Why? I blame the Magnaplanars and to a lesser extent the Ampzillas, but mostly the components just didn't work well together.
On the other hand, a few years ago, comparing a $5000 solid state system to a $40,000 tube system (both playing at the same monitored level through the same $1000ea. Linn bookshelf speakers) it was like night and day, it was as if two extra musicians had joined in. Sometimes the differences are profound even when the cheaper system would likely test better (or at least practically perfect as far as the numbers go) and the more expensive system likely had more measurable distortion, the extra money can buy a dramatically better experience if spent wisely.
(OTOH the $25,000 ea. speakers sounded lousy. Caveat auditor.)
A little bit fancier way is to use CAT5 cable the same way. Or use 3 cables and braid them rather than twisting. Nylon braid instead of heat-shrink tubing also works well (with a few inches of heat-shrink on either end to hold it together and provide some strain relief). Old-style computer ribbon cable with alternate wires connected at either end (conductor A = wire 0,2,4,6...; conductor B = wire 1,3,5,7...) also works great and allows running behind baseboards or under carpets.
Frequency issues might be switching power supply or digital noise leaking into the signal path, or microphonic feedback of the sound to the signal path when high impedance inputs are used inside the circuit, particularly if they are left floating. Digital stuff can easily pollute the power supply inside a component if some care isn't taken - not hard, and most components have great PSRR, but some old-school discrete designs that have been reused won't deal as well with a dirty power supply. Cheap capacitors in the signal path can also cause gross changes in the frequency response, especially with heating and aging. Even good caps used as DC-blocking will give some soakage (turn into electrets) and thus start turning sine waves asymmetric, but only after many hours of use. Paper speaker cones - shudder!
Yes, the sound setup core may be the same, but if people are constantly hooking up instruments and microphones and making input adjustments, all sorts of things can happen. Worn or corroded jacks, cords, pots, switches etc. can screw things up terribly; ESD and input overloads can have an immediate or cumulative effect on all sorts of things, new electrical stuff not even hooked up to the sound system can cause interference. And it's rare for one person to have complete 24-7 control over a venue setup. Some idiot might mess with practically anything when you're not looking. It always works just fine - until it breaks - so sound engineers really need to document what should be there, how it's supposed to be hooked up, how it is supposed to perform and make sure that it's all still working right before every performance.
Op-amps come in thousands of flavors, they each have hundreds of performance parameters, at least half a dozen of which need to be considered even in a first-pass design. Common types of op-amps in low-power signal paths are usually much better than transistors even when given 1/10th the component count and 1/10th the design effort of a discrete circuit. Used by a real expert, they can do things that couldn't be done at all with discrete circuits.
The problem is that many engineers simply don't pay attention to any of the important characteristics of the components, drop in a '741 or TL072, use a cookbook circuit, don't even bother to model the circuit (or don't model the actual devices they are using or the relevant circuit response measures), and don't fully test the real circuit. Heat? Details of the character of harmonic distortion? Error budgets? Phase margin? Noise? It's all a mystery to these analog script kiddies who can't use 4/5 of their SPICE simulator and may never have melted a bit of solder (except maybe by mistaking amps for milliamps.)
No, there is a relationship between cranial volume and intelligence. It can be confounded by several other factors, (e.g. hydrocephalus, white vs. gray matter, cortical area, body size) which weaken the correlation, but it is real.
Here's the first decent reference I could find: "In a meta-analysis McDaniel (2004) found an in vivo brain volume/IQ correlation of 0.33 based on 37 published studies (N= 1535)..."
http://abc102.wordpress.com/2011/02/17/brain-size-and-correlates-with-iq/
Citing: http://www.govrel.vcu.edu//news/Releases/2005/june/McDaniel-Big%20Brain.pdf
A real passion for learning is the kiss of death to a college GPA. 99.99995% of the knowledge in the library has no bearing on your next set of midterms or finals. Pursuing any of that other knowledge will actually hurt your grades. Even if it is related, if it disagrees with your professors opinions, knowing it could hurt your grades. The grades you get also have little to do with how much you know about the course topic, less to do with what you'll actually be able to remember in ten years, still less with your ability to think about it, nothing to do with your ability to apply it, and a negative amount to do with your ability to innovate in the field. College diplomas are certificates of conformity, nothing more. The process of getting them actually damages competence and creative ability in many ways.
The point is to be flexible - if you are open to learning, to experimenting, then as you work on a project you will discover better goals than the one you originally set out to reach. If you see a better goal along the way than the one you set out to reach, then change the goal. Changing the goal will mean throwing out all your schedules and project planning. But continuing on to the wrong goal just because you have invested a lot of time in a detailed plan for how to get there is dumb.
Oh, yeah - nothing makes you look more incompetent than having your project be ahead of schedule.
Well, I'd say they could smuggle a nuke into the US in an Afghan heroin shipment, but actually the US is pretty on top of the contents of those - ;-)
What? Iraq attacked Iran. Iran fought Iraq to a standstill. The cost was horrific, but Iran won - Iraq did not gain territory. Iran learned from that lesson. They will still take unlimited casualties if they have to in order to defend their borders, but they will not be using human wave assaults again. They are geared up and trained for a guerrilla defense this time, and are likely better prepared to defend against airstrikes than any nation we have faced in a hot war since Germany.
Oh, and a full scale assault on Iran will close the Straits of Hormuz and send oil to well over $200, which will lead directly to a depression, which we won't be able to spend out way out of as we have tried to do from 2008 to the present. Syria will back up Iran, Russia and China won't likely be on our side, our NATO buddies are busy in Libya (and will be even less enthusiastic than they were about going into Iraq), the incompetent Saudis will join in and get their noses bloodied despite all the fancy planes we sold them, Venezuela will cut off oil imports to the US, Hezbollah will go after Israel (after Israel starts more shit on the border even than usual) and we'll be lucky if the nukes don't start flying. We're talking WW III here. Messing with Iran should not be on our dance card, no matter how big a boner Netanyahu has to go in. (He's going to try in September, is the rumor. How he expects to get over Iraq, I don't know. Bush wouldn't let him. Maybe Obama will be more pliant.)
In nearly all jurisdictions small claims court is not a court of equity - it cannot do much but award cash damages.
"To think that your average Marine or Solider can't think or be creative is an insult."
True, true. One of the smartest people at the regional phone company top-level DSL tech support, with direct control over literally millions of circuits and tens of thousands of optical switches, had spent a 20-year hitch enlisted in the Army motor pool. The thing is, intelligence and creativity are usually actively punished by the system, especially if there is already a defined process that is being modified or ignored, and that's true whether in the military or the phone company. The better managers and officers know when to look the other way, but most of them are by-the-book or social/ office-politics types who don't fully respect their subordinates' knowledge and ability. Regardless of the individual abilities and personalities up and down the chain, the organization as a whole has an inertia and a resistance to initiative, creativity and just plain common sense that no individual can do much about.
The problem is that after being slapped down a few times, the smart ones give up or get out, and the organization's overall ability falls a bit every time.
See: http://bigip-blogs-adc.oracle.com/brendan/entry/test for more about ARC, L2ARC, using SSDs with ZFS. With 128GB RAM, 550GB of SSDs, and 18TB of disk, the speedup was 8.4x over just the RAM and disks, with 20x less latency. YMMV with different workloads.
Number 1 thing would be more / bigger network links. I think this has used all its PCIe slots, so you might have to cut the capacity by 1/3 to put in a bigger network card - say a 4x Gigabit Ethernet card (cheap) or a 10gig card (more expensive, plus need the 10gig port to hook it to). Or get a motherboard with more slots.
More speculatively:
More RAM might help if you can set it up to cache the right things. Faster drives would help the IOPS (lower latency) but the bandwidth bottleneck is going to be the network. You'll likely want two or three of these boxes for redundancy and backup, too. (Plus spares of everything.) Or maybe a big tape loader, but at this scale I think whole-server redundancy is a lot less trouble. (Your backup will weigh ~145lbs, though.)
ZFS is likely a more reliable good way to go than RAID, though some think it's too new. If you add some SSDs, you can get better system response, too:
"ZFS also supports both read and write caching, for which special devices can be used. Solid State Devices can be used for the L2ARC, or Level 2 adaptive replacement cache, speeding up read operations, while NVRAM buffered SLC memory can be boosted with supercapacitors to implement a fast, non-volatile write cache, improving synchronous writes. Finally, when mirroring, block devices can be grouped according to physical chassis, so that the filesystem can continue in the case of the failure of an entire chassis."- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZFS
With a lot of RAM, mostly set up as a disk, a UPS, (and a shutdown script running on line power loss, of course) the write caching could likely be implemented more inexpensively than the SLC solution. It isn't that big a perceived performance increase on most systems, though, and adds some risk. Regular MLC SSD read caching with L2ARC can make the system far more responsive at very little cost, and with no reliability concerns if ZFS is set up correctly.