The thing is, I can put solar on my house, and I will be to able to generate enough power, on occasion, to have some extra to put back on the grid. With the right configuration and local storage, I can even go off the grid. As a consumer, the other options you mention are things I can't do. Sure, solar is more expensive per KWH, but at least it's doable for lots of homeowners.

Separately, you may not have noticed that the Republicans have held effective veto power over new legislation in the Senate until just yesterday. Thus, making the claim the Republicans (even with a minority in the Senate) can be held somewhat responsible for lack of progress in the area seems reasonable.

Sure, that's why I said that this is an advance. If you don't need HPC resources, this can work really well. But, you have educate scientists and researchers on the difference, and this article doesn't do that well enough.

While this a nice use of Amazon's EC to build a high throughput system, that doesn't translate as nicely to what most High Performance computing users need- high network bandwidth, low latency between nodes and large, fast shared filesystems on which to store and retrieve the massive amounts of data being used or generated. The cloud created here is only useful to the subset of researchers who don't need those things. I'd have a hard time calling this High Performance Computing.

Look at XSEDE's HPC resources page. While each of those supercomputers has something special about the services they offer (GPU's SSD's, fast access, etc), they all spent a significant portion of their build budget on a high performance network to link the nodes for parallel codes. They also spent money on high performance parallel filesystems instead of more cores. Their users can't get their research done effectively on systems or clouds without those important elements.

I think that it's great that public cloud computing has advanced to the point where useful, large-scale science can be accomplished on it. Please note that it takes a separate company (CycleCloud) to make it possible to use Amazon EC in this way (lowest cost and webapp access) for your average scientist, but it's still an advance.

Disclaimer: I work for XSEDE, so do your own search on HPC to verify what I'm saying.

There is no need for tax. In a system where the government can create money directly, government projects which create "civilization" can be funded by simply creating the extra cash. Doing so devalues the existing cash (because now it's less rare) so this cash creation needs to happen in moderation, but it does work.

And this is how things work now. Tax does not fund the government. If it did, we wouldn't be taking out loans and racking up debt. As this situation proves, tax provides a very small amount of the government funding.

And that's fine. I like the government being able to create money. I like roads and schools and national parks and NASA. In fact, creating money is the perfect tax- the dollar decreases in value and therefore those with a lot of dollars lose more than those with only a few. And there's no administration to be done to facilitate it.

What's not fine is the only mechanism the government has to create money is to borrow it from a bank. People like to rant about which banks it borrows from (the fed, china, wherever) but that's short sighted.

The problem is the fact we end up paying interest on ever dollar the government creates.

And that's what isn't sustainable. Paying tax to pay interest is unacceptable.

The idea behind defaulting is to get away from this ridiculous idea that the government of this nation has to borrow money to create money. Going about it this way would have been horrible, but seriously considering breaking the tie is worth real consideration.

My horse is amazing.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=etm3kN6VBv8

One of the features I'm most proud of I coded almost entirely at the Tomorrowland Terrance Restaurant in the Magic Kingdom (WDW Florida).

Quiet places can be found just about anywhere. All you need is electricity, and for the most part you can bring your own these days (laptop batteries are way better than they used to be).

At work I need to install several different types/versions of linux OS's for testing. I always torrent the ISO as a way of "paying" for the image that I'm using.

A few years back, we did some experimenting with torrents over the Teragrid 10GBe backbone, to see how well that worked over the long haul between IL and CA. With just 2 endpoints, even on GBe, it wasn't better than a simple rsync. We did some small scale test with less than 10 cluster nodes on one side, but still not as useful as a Wide Area filesystem we were testing against. Bittorrent protocols just aren't optimized for a few nodes with a fat pipe between them.

I am interested in looking at the new Bitorrent Sync client to see how thanks for our setup. We have many users with 10's of TB's of data to push around on a weekly basis.

Unknown Unknowns
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUuzxjwXVXE

If the purpose of patents is "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries" then no, I don't see how restricting patents to physical implementations (not software on a general purpose computing device) utterly defeats that purpose. Nothing restricts the author from enforcing his patent on physical reproductions, he just can't claim that a non-physical implementation is a violation.

Can you give any examples where this change would stop or slow scientific progress?

My main concern would be heat- and there's not much you can do about it, unfortunately.

Sun on a metal box basically turns it into an oven. Hopefully your container isn't on top.

ALL Inventions are so good the should be shared.

Can we, by popular vote, chose who needs to be sent to another planet? I have a few ideas...