Depends...do you count raw tonnage of servers, or do you include the ancillaries like cable runs, UPS, cooling etc?

Easy way to win:

My Eniac replica, combined with my replicas of Mayan and Egyptian pyramids (purportedly used as astronomical computers...you know, by the illuminati, etc ;)) means that I win by sheer tonnage!

Except you don't pay by volume.

Take Google's Dalles datacenter in Oregon. They pay for their water by the diameter of the pipe. They have (iirc) two 6 inch pipes. It doesn't matter if a drop or a hurricane flows through them.

Same thing with the power for that datacenter. Bonneville Power charges them based on the peak monthly load, not the total consumed power. So 500 megawatt load for an hour is a lot more expensive than 250 megawatt load for a month.

It is the diameter of the pipe that is expensive, not how much goes through it.

So, the administration identified the 'drug' in question as ibuprofen...They knew what they were looking for. They knew what a student had previously gone to the hospital for taking.

The LD50 of that drug is something close to 636 mg/kg. The child (weighing about 45kg) would have had to take 28 GRAMS to OD. That's something like 40 tablets of the prescription strength stuff.

Both OTC and prescription painkillers in the Advil/Ibuprofen or Tylenol/Tylenol with codeine class are designed to be very hard to OD on. You will throw up most of the 40 pills long before they reach your kidneys and liver, which then cause a slow 2 week death without treatment.

If they were SO WORRIED about her 'health' or the health of other students, they should have called poison control or 911. They might have been able to address health concerns faster that way. The fact that they searched her indicates they had little care for her health, and only cared about discipline. They even lectured her about 'telling the truth' after the search.

It's simple: After searching her belongings, a legal representative should have been there before searching her person. The early teenage years are perhaps the most vulnerable years a human has psychologically. If anything, her age makes the search that much more egregious. Go back a few years and look at the "Voices from the Hellmouth" series that was on slashdot.

The fact that it happened 6 years ago is inconsequential. 6 years ago, a violation of a person was committed without consent, and allegedly without legal cause, which by any sane definition is assault. The fact that it is 6 years later has everything to do with our lengthy appellate process, and no bearing on the crime in question.

You might be interested in Antonio Damasio's book "Descarte's Error" in which Damasio scientifically presents evidence that the majority of our reasoning is in fact mediated by emotion and "gut feeling" linked to situational stimulus. Damage to the pre-frontal cortex of the brain (see: Phineas Gage) impairs this "secondary" emotional system and causes quantifiable decision-making deficits. Gladwell is referring to just this system in Blink, and although he does occaisionally lapse into pop-sci there is a significant body of work that supports his main conclusions.

As another interesting aside, this is why teenagers have such a poor time making good long-term decisions. The pre-frontal cortex is one the last places in the brain to fully mylleinate (develop), and so their emotion-based reasoning system does not fully come on line until they are 18-22. As the insurance commercial goes: Why do teenagers driver like they're missing a part of their brain? Because they are.

I was researching crime before a move as well. I was stuck using an absolutely horrible web-enabled wannabe GIS thing. Having used ArcGIS, I know what a decent GIS is capable of. Google Earth is well on its way to being able to display information the way ArcView does. A buffer wizard type tool would be a wonderful thing in Google Earth...The analytical side of things is not really suitable for the Google Earth architecture though.

Yeah, Google would do well to integrate even census data (which includes some crime, pollution and economic data) into Google Earth.

I am speaking more about the damage that has come about from catering to the individual. It leads to people feeling they have a right to preferential treatment. This problem exists at all levels of economic status and in turn leads to people trying to find ways to use systems that might otherwise be beneficial to all for their own personal gain. All the while, their self-serving approaches slowly begin to erode the system for others who are willing to follow the rules. You see this in the people who attempt to cheat the welfare system (so called "welfare queens"). You also see it in the insider trading of the upper middle class and wealthy. Both the welfare system and the stock market can be positive systems that could benefit everyone. But for that to work, everyone involved must follow some rules.

Another less important but example of how placing focus on the individual is a detriment is the concept of "tagging" on the web. It is one of the ultimate examples of the cult of the individual. It places the importance of an individual's perceptions above formal taxonomy of information using known and predictable classifications. Tagging, might have some useful applications in some arenas, but not when you really want reliable classifications. We wouldn't want tagging to be used to classify species, or define parts of the human body, or categorize library books. But, one of those things is being talked about. Some libraries are considering moving away from or entirely abandoning the Library of Congress or Dewey Decimal system in favor of more "friendly" tagging. Can you imagine the morass that libraries would become if they rely on end-user tagging? People have enough trouble finding the books they want on the shelves today. Tagging would make that an impossible task.

Yet another bit of fallout from placing too much focus on individuals is the lack of civility that we've seen in western society. People are much more likely to place far too much importance on their own endeavors and their own time to be bothered with actually thinking of others. It is a major inconvenience for people today to think about how they affect everyone else. And I suggest that this has happened only because we've been raising one or two generations (possibly three) with the idea that they as individuals are the most important thing in life. It's led to an "I've got mine, you go get yours" attitude that is destroying civility. There is no longer any consideration for what was once called "civic duty".

Because of all of this focus on the individual, people also tend to feel that there's no reason for them to put forth the effort and hard work required to keep the rest of the world working. "Leave that to someone else. I'm busy working on making myself a success. Why should I need to know how to do X, Y and Z when I can just become a millionaire and pay other people to do this stuff for me"? The sad reality is that people with that attitude exist at every level of society and because of the cult of the individual, they have increased in number to a count that is far higher than it ever was in previous generations.

People like this used to be considered sociopaths and were ostracized for their selfish behavior. Today, they are glorified in the media as being the prime example of the highest form of human being. Just look at the number of celebrities and "personalities" who are held up as successes, completely ignoring the fact that they've done nothing for the betterment of mankind. In many cases they don't even have any real talent worthy of the attention. And yet, there they are, on display for the rest of the world to emulate.

I concur that the shepherds in this case are the advertising business within the media simply trying to separate people from their money. But, I don't see that as the real problem. The real problem, in my view, is that people are not resistant to these appeals to the individual. The small number of people who are resistant to those appeals are vastly marginalized in our society as modern day outcasts. They are the "fools" who don't see the writing on the wall. Or they are "out of touch" with the pulse of America. Or they are dull, boring and needlessly pedantic.

This cult of individuality reached a turning point enabled first by cable television and then in the 90s, by the internet. It appeals to the lazy, the mediocre and the cunning (which is not the same as intelligent or smart). That is specifically what I am talking about. The growing push for people to be like this has also been accompanied by a society-wide time impoverishment. With the lack of time to do all the things that one wants and needs to do in a day, people are content taking shortcuts. Those shortcuts are built around putting the individual in an imaginary position of authority over their own lives. But the insidiousness of the whole situation is such that the shortcuts simply mold them into the sheep that the various shepherds want.

Mostly I'm just writing this to clarify my belief that placing the focus on the individual is not a good thing. My nature is such that I've always preferred cooperative modes of working to competitive ones. The progress might not be as fast as when competition is the driver, but I think the progress is more stable, and usually fair for all. As long as everyone does the most important thing when working as a group: follow the rules.

And that's why it's a good idea to research the bacteria/moulds etc which live in and near Chernobyl. Life 'finds' a way, and thanks to the random changes/evolution of the lifeforms there, some very interesting and potential mutations can have popped up there.

We'll have to go look, though.

http://blanu.net/curious_yellow.html/

Brandon Wiley proposed a scenario in which a future internet would be consumed by the warfare between several (black or white) worms that feature node-coordinated efforts to prevent detection and removal. For those too lazy to read the link, "Curious Yellow" is basically a modular worm in which zero-day exploits can be added as they are discovered allowing for unchecked growth across the 'net. The worm can then work with other nodes to attack targets by dropping all their traffic, or by subtly modified whatever they receive. The best way to fight such a worm is with fire, a similarly designed "white" worm that goes around patching hosts as quickly as it can.

IMO, remote exploits are rare enough that I don't see this ever happening. On the other hand, with enough infected bot nodes to work with the data mining potentials of some of the more sophisticated extant work networks does worry me...