I've only spent half a day with it, but I'd have to say, no. It's as resource-intensive as ever, the UI still freezes intermittently when there's any processing going on at all, and it crashed completely when trying to play a short video.

On the other hand, it managed to resurrect my copy of Dr Horrible's Sing-Along Blog which iTunes 10 ate. (The player said I hadn't downloaded it and wouldn't play, and the store said that I had downloaded it and wouldn't download. iTunes11 re-downloaded it for me. And crashed a short while later.)

After you have a couple of semesters of credits in science and math? Mission accomplished.

Lack of debris? Lack of airplane? If you believe that, I'd seek a second opinion if you said the sky is blue.

That's true. A 16-core Opteron has the same FP width as an 8-core Xeon, and a higher TDP for a given clock.

On the other hand, we buy almost all AMD because it lets us build cheap 1U or 2U 4-socket servers with 512GB of RAM each. 4-socket Intel chips (E5-4600 or E7) are much more expensive; mid-range servers work out to 50% more for Intel, and high-end servers about 80% more for equivalent speed.

I'm not saying that the United States in general and the Bay Area in particular don't have their foibles - like every other place humans have ever lived. But at least those people don't post vacuous twaddle on Slashdot bemoaning the blighted state of the souls of entire populations.

Also, souls don't exist.

Yes.

So what you're saying is that America is populated with people?

Odd. We've been rolling out dual and quad Opteron 6272 servers steadily for the past six months. No problems with supply, and they mop the floor with Intel systems on price/performance.

But we don't buy from Newegg; we go through three vendors Supermicro recommended.

So the fact that it's a unconscionable infringement on fundamental liberties doesn't worry you, but the possibility of the law being upheld consistently does?

So it's bureaucracy run wild, then?

For 10k users? Piece of cake. One good programmer with some sysadmin experience, one business person, a nice redundant set of dedicated servers (say $5K/month), and you're set. Add another developer and a designer on contract for the first six months to get you up and running, and keep them if the business is successful.

You won't get rich, but if you can keep the user base, you'll have a comfortable little business. (Keeping the user base is obviously the hard part.)

The difficulties with a Twitter-like service come from scaling. A naive implementation off a system like Twitter leaves you with an O(N^2) workload, and you will die. There are lots of subtle tricks to making such a system work on a large scale, but for 10k or 20k users brute force is sufficient. The danger is that if you are successful you might grow yourself to death, as Twitter nearly did, but at $50/year that's probably not so much of an issue.

Star formation will end in about 100 trillion years (the last remaining hydrogen in dust clouds will be exhausted) and those last red dwarf stars will all be gone 20 trillion years after that. The Universe will be a cold and lonely place.

By then I should have gotten to at least page 2 of my to-do list.

30 to 150 million cubic metres per second. So 12 minutes of Gulf Stream flow would contain enough uranium to supply our present needs for a year.

Though if you could tap the entire Gulf Stream you'd have another source of energy at hand...

It's not economically feasible now, but the energy balance works out. Even with the previous method that was only 1/5th as efficient, you got much more energy out of the uranium than was required to collect it.

Seawater moves around, and the process still isn't that efficient, so you wouldn't have any problems with decreased concentration.

The reason this is valuable is not so much that it's economical today, as that there's enough uranium in the ocean to provide all our electricity needs for millions of years.

If we see anything like the recent Queensland state election there'll barely be a Labor Party left.