I'm a physicist. About ten years ago, a professor told me that he payed three times the price of his laptop for Mathematica, because he needed it. Depending on the subject you're working on, Mathematica could be indispensible for scientists (other scientists have it if you don't, and they will publish before you).
In 2013, I don't know if this is still true, since there are a lot of good free alternatives to Mathematica. I must admit, there is still a problem that I don't know how to solve, and Mathematica does, but maxima and sympy didn't know how to do it when I last checked. But I'm lucky and my symbolic computations are reasonably simple. My impression is that having Mathematica, if you know how to use it, is like having a team of math PhD's as slaves, so it's great when you can afford it.
I am certain that there are a lot of results that wouldn't have been found without Mathematica.

Regarding MSOffice... I used MSWord 95-98 until about 2000, 2001 I think. Then I discovered TeX, and I never went back to MSWord or anything like it. The only reason I used it was that I was in Eastern europe, I didn't pay anything for it (I'm not even sure I really understood I was supposed to pay something for it), and I didn't really know there was anything else available.
I never had any use for anything else from MSOffice, and I honestly don't understand why anyone would want to use it, taking into account that if you want to migrate between different versions of MSOffice you have to use OpenOffice or LibreOffice...

With my above comment I intended to point out that there are usage cases where it does make sense to pay more for software than for the hardware (the dude I replied to said there can't be such cases). I cannot imagine anyone convincing me that MSOffice or any similare software is worth more than an average laptop, but I can imagine someone convincing me that Mathematica, or Maya, or some other specialized software is worth much more than a laptop.
In fact, I believe MSOffice is worth at most what LibreOffice is worth, since more people complain about MSOffice than LibreOffice... but I'm a nerd/hippie/communist/whatever, so my opinion may not matter.

not that I disagree with your comment about LibreOffice, but I do want to point out that there are people for which it makes sense to buy Mathematica, even if it costs more than the machine itself (I have no idea whether they're using a subscription model now or not).

if you would like a use for your gaming machines, why not BOINC? you can choose where to donate computing power, although I'm not sure how many projects work on the gpu.

I don't love insects, but your suggestion felt fundamentally evil.
On the one hand, the summary says "ant kids cry out for help", and then you explicitly say "let's take advantage of that to kill ants".
At least kitchen bug traps work by luring them with tasty smells, so I can reason "well, we are taking advantage of gluttony".

yes, but are you ready for the multibillion dollar law suites that will follow them posting pictures of the stuff online? that will teach you to play with this imagination stuff you like so much...

The camera is behind and "below" Saturn, and Saturn's rings are "tilted" towards the Sun (you can see this because the planet's shadow on the rings is curved; if the ring was parallel to the light rays, the shadow would have straight edges).
The planet's back is lit by the rings: the upper part gets light reflected by the rings, and some diffused light, while the lower part only gets diffused light, that's why the upper part is better illuminated.
The "black rings" that you can see over the upper part of the planet are just the back of the rings (i.e the part that's in Saturn's shadow). Because the planet is much better illuminated than this portion of the rings, you see them as black on colored background (they must receive some light from the back of the planet, but that's probably below the sensitivity threshold of the camera).
They are "offset" because you only notice the portion between the camera and the planet; the rest of the shadowy part of the rings is dark on a dark background, so you can't see it.

same here. for that money you can get a GP with 16 GB of ram, and an 8 core cpu, and full hd screen.

posting to undo moderation mistake. why the hell do they put redundant next to insightful?

I went to the wikipedia page after reading the xkcd comic that had "lucid dreaming" in its mouseover text.
There, I saw that lucid dreaming is taught to people who have a lot of nightmares, while undergoing therapy, so that they can gain control over their dreams.
It sounded intriguing, but I didn't have the patience to learn more about it.

In any case, sorry to hear you ran into stupid people.
But if you did train yourself to do this, I do have a couple of questions:
(1) can you control the passage of time in your dreams in any way?
(2) how elevated is the math you can do without waking up?

a lot of people can train themselves for lucid dreaming.
look it up.

um... actually, knowledge for the sake of knowledge seems good enough to me.
I agree it sounds selfish while there are still people starving to death, but knowledge in itself is a worthy goal.

You are right.
But, the question is not if we are in a *correct* simulation, but whether we are in a simulation good enough to fool humanity.
For something like this, they would only have to worry about the relatively small number of people who are actually conducting experiments on quantum physics.
For the rest of us, solving for some "macroscopic" quantities such as thermodynamic quantities would be good enough, since we would simply ignore the noise term coming from their errors as being part of thermal noise anyway.

In any case, my feeling is their approach is wrong first of all because when we are trying to simulate the universe we are doing it differently.
Why would the transcedental geeks do it in a way we ourselves wouldn't aprove of?

You're right, but to be honest, all of physics is the same.
Theoreticians come up with a mathematical model to explain observations, those models make predictions about stuff that hasn't been observed yet, and experimentalists check those predictions.
If the experiments come out as the theoreticians predicted, we say the mathematical model is "reality".
However, there are clear examples where this method fails: the various competing models of exotic physics, that we can't experiment on, because the experiments are too expensive.

So we never prove that the mathematical model is the perfect description of the underlying reality, we just prove that it is undistinguishable, within experimental error, from the perfect description.

link to the 12 studies please.
so far my feeling is that you are knowingly lying, and the authors of those studies are knowignly lying.
the argument is that HFT unbalances the market, because a chosen few can intervene much faster than most. you did not bring a counterargument to this.

Most energy that's not coming from the star of your system will have very low density, low enough so that it's useless.
Unless reality decides to have fun, and the whole zeropoint energy idea turns out to work.