I live in a relatively small city in Idaho and just signed up for a 50Mbps (seriously... and I really do get that!) for ~$50 a month (this is with CableOne in case anyone is interested).

It has a cap at 50GB a month (which is already pretty generous) but it also has a couple of other niceties:

1. If you go over it's only 50 cents per gigabyte... which I think is pretty fair.

2. Any traffic between midnight and 6 AM is completely unmetered. So if you have a big download to do (like a new game on Steam) just start it after midnight and you're good to go.

Overall I'm extremely happy with the service. Streaming over Vudu and Netflix is awesome... downloading game patches happens instantly... And my wife can listen to Pandora while I play an online game without issue.

Hopefully more parts of the country will get service like this.

What do you mean by "only one of my compilers actually takes advantage of the multiple cores when it is compiling"?

Are you on Windows? Because any compiling done in linux with a "make" based (or similar) build system can use as many cores as you can throw in a machine (regardless of the actual compiler it's running). It should be the same in Windows...

Don't look to your compiler to be multithreaded... look at the build system (i.e. in Visual Studio there should be an option somewhere to tell it how many processors to use while compiling). For make you just do "make -j8" to use 8 "jobs" total for compiling (i.e. 8 instances of the compiler will be running).

Here is a test for one of my software projects doing "make -j#" where # is 1,4,8,12,16,24:

1 : 15m9.614s
4 : 3m57.947s
8 : 2m6.354s
12 : 1m33.426s
16 : 1m25.559s
24 : 1m17.345s

That is on my dual 6-core hyperthreaded Mac workstation (so it had 12 "real" cores and 12 "hyperthreads"). You can see that hyperthreads definitely aren't as good as real cores... but do provide some speedup. That said, I thank God every time I compile (which is all day long) for the cores he has bestowed upon me...

Good to hear that you are already on SSD... because parallel compiling does need speedy disk to keep the processors humming. The timings above are for two 256GB SSD's in RAID0.

Right line of thinking... but wrong application.

Traditional Light Water Reactors (LWRs) using "fuel rods" use cylindrical fuel (called pellets) stacked perfectly on top of each other inside a tube (the "rod") that is just barely large enough to admit the pellets. So this wouldn't apply there...

(If you would like to see _me_ explaining some simulations of nuclear fuel rods (among other things) check out this youtube video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-2VfET8SNw )

However, as I mentioned in a comment below, this _does_ have applications to generating geometry and meshes for simulations of pebble bed reactors (PBRs) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble_bed_reactor

EXCEPT: PBRs definitely don't qualify for the 2.7013 restriction....

I completely agree...

This is how science is done. It's a _ton_ of tiny small steps towards an eventual achievement that will have broader impact on society as a whole.

The fact that the media only latches on to the end-goal achievements gives a false sense of "magic" about science and leads to the average person believing that "scientists just get lucky"... and that it really isn't "hard" to achieve these things....

I too would love to see more of these types of stories on Slashdot... a lot of the typical trolls seem to have left Slashdot. Maybe we can actually refocus it on niche news of interest to scientists and nerds in general...

"One caveat is that the diameter of the cylinder can be at most 2.7013 times as large as the diameter of the spheres being packed."

Around here we need a fast packing algorithm for generating geometry for simulations of Pebble Bed Reactors http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble_bed_reactor

We have quite a bit of code to do these problems... and we never actually end up computing perfect packing... we just hope to get close....

Maybe someone will see a way to extend this to more general ball packing problems....

"She was turned off by the iPad because she couldn't find the apostrophe."

FFR: Just hold down comma for a moment....

No - the wireless industry is not a free market. Spectrum is a very closely held resource carefully distributed to 3 or 4 major players... so free market forces can't fix this. If there was an infinite amount of spectrum and anyone could jump in and make a new wireless company... then there could be proper free market forces.

I'm not saying we should just let people go crazy with spectrum either (spectrum chaos would be bad for everyone). How to handle wireless pricing going forward is definitely going to become a problem.

I work with some of the largest supercomputers in the world... and I can tell you that this is BS. There is no way this guy got someone to give him enough cash to put this together without:

1. A Plan of what to buy / build
2. A sound reasoning behind what would be done with the machine.

Beyond that... that isn't even that large of a cluster. There are numerous computers on the east coast larger than that... at universities and government research labs (i.e. http://www.nccs.gov/computing-resources/jaguar/ although maybe he doesn't consider Oak Ridge to be on the "East Coast").

If the components "have become increasingly commoditized"... then capitalism will fix this. Some enterprising person will come along and start up a new company making hearing aids for half the current asking price and the market will fix itself. If the components really are specialized enough that they can demand the prices they have now then that won't happen (and then there is nothing wrong with the current prices).

This is actually exactly what the "story" is about... it is asking if the current market is overpriced... and if so is there going to a "bubble" where the market for hearing aids falls due to some disruptive company (or technology shift).

This is actually capitalism at work!

If there were just a single supplier (like the government) then there would be no incentive to innovate (do you honestly think that hearing aids now are the same as they were 10 years ago? My grandfather says they are orders of magnitude better (he is almost completely deaf). They would just keep pumping out "The Citizen's Hearing Aid" for years to come and that would be your only choice...

I don't really understand why people are so quick to jump to socialism for answers when things are expensive. In most cases they are expensive because they can be, because they were hard to make / invent... and if that isn't the case then capitalism "fixes" it through market forces. Yes, there are some markets where competition doesn't work... but I hardly think that hearing aids is one of those....

Not that I agree witht the article... but I think they are assuming you already own a car... and are thinking of buying a bike to be "greener".

In that scenario you've already expended the carbon for manufacturing the car and they are trying to tell you how much you would have to bike to break even on carbon after purchasing a bike...