....Fukushinium?

Well, "Dude"...I did in fact RTFA, initially hoping to see something about thorium or pebble-bed reactors. To my surprise, they're flogging is a "sodium-cooled fast reactor". That's something we've heard about before, except this time they conveniently left out the words "liquid" (before "sodium") and "breeder" (after "fast"). In our current world political climate, following Fukushima and with all the hand-wringing about terrorists and "suitcase nukes", no technology that makes plutonium is gonna fly.

I don't know if you've checked your employer's IT usage policy, but in general if it's a company computer, everything on it is company property. About the best you can do (assuming this isn't a "middle finger exit") is to talk with the IT folks and see if they'll be so kind as to wipe the disk after they've saved whatever work-related stuff they deem important. Most likely they don't give a hoot about anything NSFW (They can't fire you--you're leaving anyway) and they'll want to make sure it's gone because exposing other employees to it would be a liability for them. If it's a typical usage policy, they could indeed withold your last paycheck or even sue you for wiping the disk yourself ("destruction of company data") or for that matter for copying anything non-personal and taking it with you ("stealing company information" or "breaching security"). If you were dumb enough to store any personal passwords or sensitive personal information on it....well, it sucks to be you.

All my "real world friends" (including those I happen to be connected with on Facebook, LinkedIn and whatever the heck else) already know how to contact me. For all my other "Facebook friends" and the legion of advertisers with access to my Facebook contact info (not to mention any other merchants who seem to think they're entitled to my email even selling me stuff face to face) I'll be happy to have them hurl their spam down that bottomless pit Zuckerberg has been so kind as to provide, where I promise never to even take a fleeting look at it.

Considering Governor Scott's general mindset, it would appear that the objective is probably to create a school dedicated to turning out code pushers with wind-up keys in their backs, uncorrupted by access to a liberal-arts education. People who'll go to work every day and do what they're told, unencumbered by such pollutants as critical thinking skills or any awareness of some rather inconvenient parts of history.

The last I knew, NASA's essential mission was to do science, and this guy's work was supposed to be in support of that science. He was paid to be a scientist (or in this case, to do computery to support the science). Preaching the Gospel or some semi-covert version of creationism, while not a bad thing in and of itself, wasn't part of his job. If he was spending an indordinate amount of time on the taxpayers' dime doing so, or doing so in a way that interfered with the work of others, then yeah...I could see reprimanding him and, if he didn't cut it the hell out, kicking him out the door.

...I can see at least one bogosity and a couple of omissions. The author claims that the "phase doesn't matter" with the Nyquist criterion, when it can easily be shown that, for instance, sampling a 20KHz sign wave at exactly at 40KHz can result in a zero signal if the input and the sampling are synchronized such that the sampling points all occur as the input waveform crosses zero. If they're slightly out of sync, something will get through but it'll be greatly attenuated. More importantly is the issue of "aliasing"--if there's any component to the input that's of a higher frequency than the sampler, the digital result will contain a "difference" component somewhere in the audible spectrum. For an idea of what this might sound like, listen to Don Ellis playing his trumpet through a ring modulator at the beginning of "Hey Jude" from the "Live At Fillmore" album. In practice, the sampling rate is placed somewhat higher than the maximum input frequency, to compensate for the analog input filter's cut-off being less than perfect. The 44.1 KHz rate for CD audio was the lowest rate at the time that allowed the recording industry to be able to claim "high-fidelity" i. e. reproduction of a 20-20KHz bandwidth. 48KHz is probably safer. Admittedly 192KHz is overkill, but perhaps not for mastering, assuming the amount of post-processing that's likely to happen between the original recording and the listener. Typical "webcasting" software, for example, contains multiple layers of digital filters, compression and whatnot, so it helps to start with something that's not already compromised.

Change has to come over time, and while incentives in Europe and elsewhere have encouraged alternatives to long-distance commuting by car, the US until the crash has been continuing to gallop in the opposite direction. Where mass transit is popular and works well, that's been accomplished not entirely by running trains and buses on every thoroughfare. People have also chosen to arrange where they live and work to take advantage of available transit, and developers followed in their decisions of where and how to build. In addition, people might have a different idea about the preciousness of their time. Perhaps the "socialist" meme of shorter work weeks has some advantages over the American "workaholic" archetype that grew from "management by emergency". I used to drive to work and now commute by bus, and I can personally attest that although it does take longer, now I actually look forward to the "down time" at the beginning and end of the day in which I can relax and let someone else worry about the traffic.

One is his mention of how often digital TV sound is out of sync...which nobody else seems to talk about, ever. The other is that he's spot on about the "idiophiles" who think if a $200 amplifer is ten times as good as a $20 one, then a $20,000 amp has to be 100 times better still. Those folks lost me back when a bunch of them were claiming that your amplifier had to be built with point-to-point hand wiring instead of printed circuits, because the latter sounded "flat"...

There's really no such thing as a "refurbished" drive. It's an industry euphemism from "pulled from equipment", and perhaps minimally tested to see if it spins up, the spindle bearing doesn't sound like a siren and a controller can detect it. Worst-case, these came from old machines that some dishonest "recycler" crated up and sent to Africa to be dissected by kids in a mud hut. There's probably more of this going on now after the floods in Thailand. I'd let Newegg know about this, but if the price was right and the damn things work, I wouldn't send them back--what's on them isn't any of Newegg's business either. Just reformat them and put them to work--hopefully in something non-critical.

Considering where most of the products are manufactured, I'd think the "C" should stand for "Chinese".

It's Windows at work because it's company policy. At home, my wife uses Windows and MS-Office because that's what she has to use at work, and being somewhat technology-hostile, she doesn't want to be bothered dealing with anything different. I have a couple of servers at home running Linux. I tried several distros in my office/studio and ran into a number of difficulties. OO and Gimp work the same on just about anything, but Flash for Linux always seemed to lag several versions behind the Windows/Mac releases. Worse yet, I do music production and some video editing, and the last time I looked at it, the Linux audio stack was a disaster. Not that life is completely rosy with Windows--try making a continuous recording longer than about 40 minutes with Audacity and listen to the results.... As to the Mac, it's less and less interesting as it becomes an increasingly closed system from the top application level on down.

"By the way, do Republicans believe that vaccines cause autism?"

Primarily the ones fantasizing about boning Jenny McCarthy.

I wouldn't be so sure. We don't know what's going on behind the scenes, and Google et al don't really care what happens to we little people as long as they make a lot of money one way or another. There's a potential here for a rerun of the under-the-counter deal Mark Cuban made with the RIAA that almost killed off webcasting ten years ago.

Dear Lord, I **AM** getting old. Ah, well, maybe that model actually can run on Guinness.