Sorry, it was a completely true story, tongue-in-cheek only in delivery (as has become my fashion when relating that particular gem). Perhaps I should be more concerned about what I write since this thread is now "viral" on The Globe and Mail, but I'm not an IT guy or a security contractor or anything. I learned many (now obsolete) skills but more importantly, learned to work hard to achieve what I wanted (communicating with other people around the world who wouldn't look down upon my diminuitive form and assume I was ignorant), and achieving it with whatever I had available. I suspect my problem solving skills were enhanced by such endeavors as well. I am good at solving both puzzles and real scientific problems. Dr. Zim's post below about the iPod training device to earn an iPhone is actually pretty decent advice but I don't believe in training my kids. It's probably the pick of the thread for anyone desiring a normative reply.

I don't have a concrete recommendation on what to buy but want to offset the attacks you're getting with some encouragement. I am a well-adjusted father with a six year old daughter and an eight year old son. I spend lots of time with my kids every day, and don't ever feel like video chatting with them while we're not together, but have no issues with them having their own phones. I'm only 28 so I still remember what it was like to be four years old. I would have loved to have had such a device and wish I did have one at that age.

My first computer was an Apple ][e from a garage sale at the age of eight (circa 1993) and it took me very little time (maybe a year) to figure out how to dial up the local freenet on my 1200/300 baud (couldn't get a stable connection at 1.2 kbaud!) modem, register an account with a completely fabricated credit card number and fictitious identity (I recall I specified my address as 123 Pooskin Rd.), and enjoy several months of access to lynx and pine. Ah, the good old days...

Of course, when my parents found out, they freaked out and made me call up the freenet folks and apologize. I pretended to leave a message on their answering machine but (thanks to text files I'd read) I knew to put my finger on the "hang-up" switch while reciting my apology and explanation. The account worked for several more years (bless those techno-anarchists' hearts for recognizing a kid in need), but my dad went ahead and purchased PPP dial-up service shortly afterwards to prevent any more "incidents."

The moral of this story? If your kid needs mobile LTE internet, better give him a phone. Otherwise, he's going to get an early start on subversive behavior, perhaps stealing other people's phones.

Proteins fold by trial-and-errol, and yes, they can become "stuck" in local minima (become denatured). That they don't routinely do so it due to evolved mechanisms (chaperones, a mostly-downhill energy gradient on the path from synthesis to folded state) and due to the rate of conformational exploration at higher-energy states. These mechanisms aren't obvious to us, and so we have a very difficult time predicting their course of action on a given polypeptide sequence.

In molecular dynamics simulations, kinetics are known to be approximate and states at a given time are not considered directly correlated with that time point; we only hope to get statistically correct distribution of states across ensembles. Consequently, differences in rounding between wildly different compiler/hardware architectures are expected. However, deterministic behavior of the system is achieved by employing higher precisions for accumulation steps, which ensures that averages over a sufficiently long time (big enough sample) are the same no matter what hardware is employed. Consequently a tremendous speed-up is possible running CUDA code on consumer grade nvidia cards which have far fewer double precision execution units than single float precision units. So, we have deterministic trajectories but nobody expects these to match real-world processes on a time-function basis :-)

I may be mistaken, but I anticipate that licensing the hardware will require sharing the associated driver sources with licensees. That seems like a step in the right direction, albeit for more profitable reasons.

The state of the art on GPUs is the latter.

Waiting for faster interconnects!

This was news a while ago.

and, you know, working with :vs panes

The Homer car was merely an artistic harbinger of the MiamicanesPad They had me up to the extra hinged displays, though. Two trackpoints, a better positioned delete key? More power for my USB coffee hotplate? OK, they had me up until the power supply.

This isn't exactly representative but isn't too far off, either. The cost of living is commesurately high in comparison to the economy's strength. Unless you're in business, or working directly in the construction or oil industries, you're probably relatively poor.

The best solution would be a portable low-power high-field NMR (OK, I might as well ask for a flying unicorn). You can detect characteristic resonances for a gazillion compounds and through TOCSY isolate them from other signals. IMO 50% of diagnostic medicine or more could be done with NMR.

The funny thing is, Planetes wasn't really about collecting space junk.

It's not like the US government isn't trying to subvert foreign governments worldwide. It's a reasonable concern. On the other hand, banning things like twitter isn't going to fix the problem.