I was wondering this too. They already knew it worked great ON MARS before they sent this. So uh, install it when it takes a second instead of a year? Seems like a no-brainer. So there must be something missing here because I'm pretty sure the folk at JPL have brains... big ones.

Except that the woman who spilled hot coffee on herself and sued, which everyone has loved to ridicule and hate, was being pretty reasonable. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald's_Restaurants

Yeah. AMDs do more for cheaper, unless you really need the double precision. But you could get up to 10 boxes with 4 AMD cards a piece for that money. Although, are you saying that you need half a gig of RAM for a single thread? If so, GPUs are not the way to go.

I don't remember the source, it's been a while, but I read an online newspaper article about how prevalent NDM-1 is in India. This was hinted at in the article: people coming from India to Europe, bringing that with them. Basically, researchers have found gut flora with the NDM-1 gene in it. Which might actually be good for not killing off your intestinal flora with antibiotics (which I personally did and was f'd for years until I took probiotics). But more importantly, they've found strains of polio and all sorts of other nasty diseases that are mostly nonexistent nowadays (or at least not causing mass epidemics anymore) with the NDM-1 gene. Ie. there already are (or will be soon) strains of every nasty disease that can kill millions of people, all resistant to every antibiotic currently known to man, floating around in the Delhi sewers. I'd like to recommend everyone buy Maitake mushroom pills or grow them yourself. They're immune system boosters. For a couple years now, I've nipped in the bud about 95% of all sicknesses I've got, be it the flu or a cold, by just taking a few of these pills as soon as I feel the symptoms coming on. Fever, nausea, sore throat? Not a problem if I take these early on. They don't work as well if you're already well into the sickness.