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Comment Re:Calculate the costs (Score 1) 391

by rnaiguy (#34612832) Attached to: Is Going To an Elite College Worth the Cost?

The investment in a good school for just 4 years is 200-250k in tuition for the lowest ranked 'top universities', think more near to 1M if you want Harvard or others in the Ivy League.

What the fuck are you smoking?????

Please don't just make up numbers when you don't know what you are talking about.

Sticker price for even the most expensive Ivy league schools is ~50-60K per year, and the better the school, the better the financial aid. I personally got better deals at more "name brand" schools than at lower ranked private colleges, which charge nearly the same rate, but lack the funds for good financial aid programs.

I graduated from an Ivy 2 years ago, where I got extensive financial aid. The full price of my education was ~40k per year, plus room and board, which I managed to cut down to under ~10k a year by living off campus. On campus would still have been well under 15k. With financial aid and on-campus work, I graduated with less than 10K in debt, with almost no financial help from the parents (beyond the occasional box of home-cooked food from mom).

btw, I thought it was totally worth it.
Security

TSA Pats Down 3-Year-Old 1135

Posted by samzenpus from the security-theater dept.
3-year-old Mandy Simon started crying when her teddy bear had to go through the X-ray machine at airport security in Chattanooga, Tenn. She was so upset that she refused to go calmly through the metal detector, setting it off twice. Agents then informed her parents that she "must be hand-searched." The subsequent TSA employee pat down of the screaming child was captured by her father, who happens to be a reporter, on his cell phone. The video have left some questioning why better procedures for children aren't in place. I, for one, feel much safer knowing the TSA is protecting us from impressionable minds warped by too much Dora the Explorer.
Programming

An Illustrated Version Control Timeline 244

Posted by CmdrTaco from the remember-when dept.
rocket22 writes "Most software developers are supposed to be using the latest in tech and see themselves as living on the edge of software innovation. But, are they aware of how old some of the tools they use on a daily basis are? There are teams out there developing iPad software and checking in code inside arcane CVS repositories. Aren't we in the 21st century, the age of distributed version control? The blog post goes through some of the most important version control systems on the last three decades and while it doesn't try to come up with an extremely detailed thesis, it does a good job creating a catalog of some of the most widely spread or technologically relevant SCMs."
Communications

Is the Number Up For the Residential Phone Book? 360

Posted by CmdrTaco from the i'm-in-the-book dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "The first phone directory was issued in 1878, two years after Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone and for decades regulators across the US have required phone companies to distribute directories in paper form. But now the Washington Post reports that Verizon, the largest provider of landline phones in the Washington DC region, is asking state regulators for permission to stop delivering the residential white pages in Virginia and Maryland. About a dozen other states are also doing away with printed phone books as surveys show that the number of households relying on residential white pages dropped from 25 percent in 2005 to 11 percent in 2008. The directories will be available online, printed or on CD-ROM upon request but the inches-thick white pages, a fixture in American households for more than a century, will no longer land on porches with a thud each year. 'I'm kind of amazed they lasted as long as they have,' says Robert Thompson, a professor of popular culture at Syracuse University. 'But there are some people nostalgic about this. Some people like to go to the shelf and look up a number.'"

Comment Re:Mutations (Score 3, Informative) 196

by rnaiguy (#34168780) Attached to: Central Dogma of Genetics May Not Be So Central
It's actually believed that the earliest forms of biochemical life consisted almost entirely of RNA. It is the only molecule we know of that can act as both information storage/transport and chemical catalyst (all proteins made by modern life are in fact polymerized by a reaction catalyzed by RNA). There is some disagreement as to whether this "RNA world" came before or after lipid membranes.

Comment Re:Couple of things (Score 1) 606

by rnaiguy (#33927872) Attached to: Generic PCs For Corporate Use?
I know you meant it tongue-in-cheek, but I wanted to point out that the specs you point out are more than sufficient to perform analyses of the human genome (I used to do quite a lot of such analyses on my laptop, which is an older Core2), and are significantly more powerful than the cluster that was initially used to piece the genome sequence together.

/rant

Comment What tests? (Score 1) 133

by rnaiguy (#32993632) Attached to: Brain Scans May Help Guide Career Choice
What exactly are they talking about? I've never heard of anyone taking such a test to choose their career in the US, with the exception of the SAT to determine college suitability.

Thus I must disagree with the premise of their importance.

Comment Re:Indeed (Score 1) 973

by rnaiguy (#32796466) Attached to: A Composer's-Eye View of the Copyright Wars
Definitely NOT universally true. I also got a student bank account and debit card, without parental involvement, at 14. However, I had friends who had trouble doing so (they got an account, but no debit card). I suspect it is more of a bank policy thing than a state/federal law thing.
Image

UK Police To Allow Gun Users To Renew Licenses With iPhone App 271

Posted by samzenpus from the there's-a-gun-for-that dept.
Sussex police are creating a number of iPhone apps for the public, including one to renew your gun license. Unsurprisingly, the plan has some anti-gun groups upset. Lyn Costello, of Mothers Against Murder and Aggression (MAMAA), said, "This isn't suitable, especially in light of what happened in Cumbria. We've got to be extra careful giving gun licenses. We have this attitude that gun murders don't happen very often so it's OK to be lax, but it is not OK and we've got to do everything in our power to stop it happening again. We can't put money before life and if you start to do that we are losing our humanity. It is a really stupid idea.''

Comment Re:Old Enough? (Score 5, Informative) 336

by rnaiguy (#31563594) Attached to: Carbon-14 Dating Reveals 5% of Vintage Wines May Be Frauds
No, I'm thinking of C14. Which is produced when all the excess neutrons from a nuclear blast smash into atmospheric nitrogen: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon-14

here's the biology reference: http://www.pnas.org/content/103/33/12564.long

these guys pioneered the tech for use in biology, but then it was popularly applied to wines.

Comment Re:Old Enough? (Score 5, Informative) 336

by rnaiguy (#31563488) Attached to: Carbon-14 Dating Reveals 5% of Vintage Wines May Be Frauds
There is a trick that can be used to date things from the 2nd half of the 20th century. Nuclear bomb testing caused a spike in atmospheric C14, which is rapidly decreasing as it equilibrates with the oceans (among other things). The actual radioactive decay is insignificant on this timescale, and so we can get a pretty good idea if the grapes used to make the wine were plucked after nuclear testing began, and if so what year they were harvested. This technique has also been used in biology to date the "birth" of cells in human tissues.

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