That, plus the fact that you need to find a buyer willing to pay for your item during the 7-day window that you've run your auction, and who's willing to wait until next Tuesday to get it.

eBay is terrible for low-volume items for this reason. (I personally flooded the eBay market for SGI Indigo workstations a while ago -- the first two sold, the rest of them never did)

FTFY. Or at least that you use the same key that everybody else does.

Feel free to continue open access, but place a social stigma on using the equipment without recording your use.

For example, imagine that when you sit down at the desk, a light goes on that says "Thanks for logging in" (if you have). Now, tomorrow, you find three other people in the lab who don't have the sign lit. You say "Hey, I can see that you didn't sign in to indicate that you're using the system-- here, let me help you"

Another way to encourage self-policing from the users is to tie maintenance or upgrades to the logged use of the system. Say "Sorry, we're not going to upgrade that oscilloscope because nobody logs that they use it. We're going to spend grant money on the bench power supply in room 6B that has lots of log entries."

Put these two things together, and the people who care about using the equipment will help you keep the other users under control.

--Joe

Water-borne pathogens in the kingdom Animalia are usually called "predators" rather than "pathogens". But yes, pathogens such as A. Mississippiensis can be filtered from the water with an appropriately-sized tree branch.

The one feature I wish it had was a USB-HID (I'd even settle for a BT/HID) emulator so that it could act as a USB keyboard to type when I have my phone plugged in. Unfortunately, none of the phone platforms will allow you to do that (easily)

Or it might be pop-media drivel written to draw money from moviegoers without any actual science or fiction (much less both)

I hope this does[n't] end up like the last debate between science and creationism:

http://www.websitesonadime.com...

--Joe

We're all familiar with Schrodinger's cat thought-experiment, right? A quantum phenomenon may or may not kill a cat in a sealed box.

This article seems to suggest that the meta-experiment-- Lock a grad student in a sealed box with the boxed cat, and have him observe the condition-- has implications about the nature of time.

Consider instructing the grad student to write a PhD thesis based on what he observes of the lifespan of the cat (check on it every minute). When we (the unentangled observer) open the box, we may find either a complete or partially-written thesis, or a live cat. The quantum state of the box-grad-box-cat system is in the superposition of states that correspond to the progress of time within that system, but that progress is completely unobservable from outside the box, regardless of how God-like the outside observer is.

Now compare the state probabilities recorded by two outside observers in relative motion. They will not agree on the amount of time that has elapsed inside the box, but must agree on the probabilities involved (otherwise there would be a preferred reference frame). So they would have to agree that time in the box doesn't exist.

Unfortunately, I don't have the background to make this thought experiment mathematically rigorous for publication.

Sure, why not? Look at how well it works in shopping malls.

There are lots of large metallic objects in the middle of the road. They're called CARS!

Yeah, but "people would be up in Intels" doesn't have the same ring to it.

Both Apple and Samsung use ARM CPUs.

Now, if this had been a Surface (non-RT) tablet, people would be up in Atoms!

Yes, and if two people buy phones tomorrow, it'll have doubled in growth for 2 days in a row.

The same way you would transfer your Windows (7 or XP)-based data to your new Windows (8) OS: Pay a knowledgeable techie to do it, or try to find all of the places that an application may have squirreled away your data, copy it to some sort of removable media (CD, DVD, or USB) and hope that the new version of the equivalent software can recognize that the data's there.

Besides, if it's that far, you might as well drive.