I travel 75% of the time, and my love playing minecraft with my kids. Setting up our own server was time well spent.

My SO doesn't like to play though. That sucks.

Yes, for strawberries your statement is accurate. Conveniently, people (and all mammals) have a significantly more complex circulatory system than a strawberry. Part of the pre-cooling perfusion process is to flood your body with chemicals that reduce this mush-forming problem. Then they use a specific cooling regimen to further reduce ice stressing by moving very slowly through the glass transition temperature.

Even with that, It's not survivable today, and that's where our R&D money goes.

Disclaimer: I am a CI member and future customer.

"So when do solar panels become effective enough to replace growing a plant to harness the sun's energy?"

When they grow on trees.

Plant based ethanol serves two purposes, energy collection and storage. The current cost per kilowatt of solar energy and storage technology isn't in the same order of magnitude vs. ethanol.

Back to the OP, there was a book from the 70's called "Alcohol, it's a gas." A crapton* of this research has already been done. Yeah industry for taking a look at it!

* Not an SI unit.

DROID4 : phone off = no location tracking? I can do without texts from the GF while about my business being an existential threat to the United States.

I completely do not understand anyone storing even remotely confidential data, much less security-related data, on servers hosted by another organization.

If some douche at Motorola is checking out pics of my GF's ass I will really feel like shooting him in the fucking face.

I'm seriously sick of this shit.

> nothing is free, handling cash is not free, writing checks is not free, setting up DD for employees not likely to stick around more than a year is not free.

Correct, these are called "costs of doing business" and should be treated as such by the employer, not clawed back from the employee. Auctioning off the employees to the card companies adds insult to injury.

Fuck those employers/slave-traders.

I had a prospective employer tell me that they round-filed my original resume because I had an aol.com email address. The same resume went through a recruiter that stripped the contact details off. I got the interview and the job.

I thought that a FirstnameLastname@aol.com email address was professionally acceptable. I was wrong. Lesson learned.

I suppose you have let that box run 24/7 then before it collapsed.

None of the boxes have collapsed, I have both my dual radeon GPU and batch 1 avalon-asic miner running currently.

The GPU box is my living room computer and it's noisier than I'd like. It helps if I keep it free of dust bunnies, but it can be annoying when watching a movie. I would like to move it elsewhere. The kids like it where it is because they can play PlanetSide 2 on the big TV with no lag.

For the Asic box I have the fans cranked way up. This makes it significantly louder than the GPU machine. It's in my non-climate controlled garage now, but that won't work for long as spring is coming. I need to come up with a better solution for this ASAP. They may end up in my bedroom as a white noise generator. I also have some as-yet-unknown worried about running all of them on the same electrical circuit, so that may force me into something else.

The ASIC miner companies are about as reliable as a rusty Yugo. Don't invest any money you aren't willing to lose. I placed an order for a Butterfly labs box in December. They still haven't shipped. I also ordered a batch 1 Avalon Asic that has shipped, arrived, and has paid for itself. The day that box broke even I canceled my Butterfly order. I subsequently ordered two more of the Avalon asics in Batch 2 and am expecting delivery within the next 3-5 weeks. The batch 1 Avalon will have paid for the batch 2 boxes by the time they arrive. The batch 3 avalons are significantly more expensive, and violate my risk/return time horizon. I am not purchasing any at this time.

My long term approach is to cash out as soon as possible to pay for the mining hardware. After that, I let BTC accumulate. 1/3 goes to my fund for whatever I want to play with, 1/3 to tangible physical precious metals (coinabul.com) and 1/3 to long term savings. Of my long term savings, a subset is conservatively invested at BtcJam.com. The rest is in a paper wallet.

The pay-for-the-hardware-first approach places me you in the gambler's paradise. That is the sweet spot where you are playing with the house's money and not your own. The disadvantage of this that I've sold 50+ Btc from GPU mining at exchange rates that were grossly lower than what they are today. It happens.

You might also consider investing in AsicMiner shares. Just a thought. That adds a whole other dynamic of risk, since you have people involved.

Cheers

s/Kh/Mh/g in the above, I said it wrong.

CPU mining is measured in Khash/sec.
GPU mining is measured in Mhash/sec.
Asic mining is measured in Ghash/sec.
Pool mining is measured in Thash/sec.

Unless your HPC cluster includes large numbers of FPGAs or GPUs, you'll be quite disappointed at the performance. If you do have GPUs then it depends on the integer operation performance of the chips. As a real world example, my 1 year old mid-range CPU mines at around 1Kh/second. The two $100 video cards in the box mine at 180Kh/s each. The $1500 Asic miners I bought last month mine at 60Gh/s each.

CPU based mining is not worth the power required to mine it and manage the heat.