2^32 - 1 = 4,294,967,296 2,147,483,647 = 2^31 -1 ...so either they were using a 31-bit integer or they were using signed ints.

How exactly does one get a negative number of views?

I find it much more probable that life begins in milder, friendlier conditions and then adapts over time to harsher environments. Of course, everything is relative.

There's a wealth of useful equipment on eBay and other places, big expensive equipment is not out of the reach of the dedicated researcher. Ben Krasnow has three (I think) electron microscopes. I personally own a UV/VIS spectrophotometer. a microgram scale, and a Weston cell.

The idea that "research can only be done at the behest of government" or "is only associated with university" is a modern fiction. Government would *like* you to believe that everything depends on their whim and largesse, but it's not the only, nor even the best way.

Build a lab and start tinkering, or join a hackerspace. Lots of people do it. Lots of good science is done this way.

The chemical layout of Tofacitinib looks fairly similar to estrogen. We've known for ages that giving MPB-afflicted men estrogen will result in hair regrowth. Unfortunately, it also makes them grow breasts, but that's besides the point.

...Really? They decided to use that acronym?

God this sounds familiar..... and that's because I wrote a PhD thesis about building a system to do something a lot like this. It involved a fairly mediocre web interface wrapping a database of trust relationships specified by end users. A trusts B for 0.7 and B trusts C for 0.6 then you can put together a trust level between A and C by multiplying those together with some user-tweakable distance dropoff. Those trust levels were then measured against the levels required for access to shared data. Maybe you would allow anyone with a 0.7 or higher to read a given document and a 0.9 or higher to contribute to it. It was an interesting idea, but man did I get tired of it by the end. If for some bizarre reason anyone wants to read bits of it google books has some indexed and I probably have a pdf laying around somewhere....

I figured it could be quite useful, but I was so fed up with the work in mid-2007 that I never looked back at it.

Which would work well if you could trust people to consistently submit "trust statements" truthfully and accurately. Sometimes people lie when they tell you who they trust and who they don't.

Right. Most people in Africa have no electricity. Gotcha. And those without electricity are the ones paying for used PCs, $15k per container, to dump them to save Americans recycling dollars. Gotcha. The urban electrification rate in Africa is 59%. Nigeria had 6.9 million households with televisions in 2006. You are more likely to be hit by a Mercedes than to die from a machete or burning computer. This e-waste hoax never stops giving.

In your own domain -- Molecular Dynamics -- you might wish to send your initial configuration (position and velocities) to a colleague/reviewer who is using a different compiler. He could, in principle, reproduce your trajectory exactly. (Otherwise, there is a compiler error.)

You might not wish to routinely run with IEEE arithmetic, because it is slower. But for those folks who need it, it is right there at their fingertips and totally and completely (ANSI/ISO) standard.