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Comment Pick the best professor - Choose linear algebra (Score 1) 466

An engaging professor is worth a lot. A good professor can make a dull subject come alive. A boring one can do the opposite.

Also, there are many flavors of math so you might want to sample to see what suits you. I would suggest a course in "linear algebra". Linear algebra has very low prerequisites - basically arithmetic - there are no "limits" to be taken. It is very useful for almost everything technical and it offers exposure to theorem and proofs. Plus you can use Octave (or Matlab) to try out programming with vectors and matrices and get some hands-on experience with the concepts.

Comment Re:Why? (Score 1) 283

For the sake of argument, I will suppose that your ISP gives you IPv6. What makes you think they'll give you more than one working address? Verizon and Comcast are known for their greed an ineptitude. For competition you need at least 3 viable choices.

Comment Re:Solution? Its not a sales tax. (Score 2, Informative) 490

Sales tax sucks because it slows down the velocity of money. You pay sales tax whenever the dollar circulates which could be many times in a year.

The income tax (while it has the really annoying forms and loss of privacy problems) is assessed on your net profit and once per year. Sales tax is on total sales revenue.

You could do a value added tax (VAT) which is not as bad as straight sales, but it still clobbers commerce and especially high volume business.

As far as fairness goes, the higher the income, the lower the percentage people pay in sales taxes. It's just empirically the way it works out (although there are solid reasons for it).

I hate the sales tax. It's my least favorite kind.

Comment Re:Super Efficient? (Score 2, Insightful) 559

Let's do the math. From that fount of knowledge that is wikipedia, the US grid is about 4 thousand terawatts. That's 4*10^15 W.

So say we want over 4 times that, like 20*10^15 W to give 4 times the power of the US grid.

Power is energy divided by time. 1 femtosecond is 10^(-15) sec.
Let energy in joules be E, power in watts be P and time in seconds be T, then
      E = P*T
So the energy of power 20*10^15 W times times time 10^(-15) is just 20 Joules.

Say it takes 1 sec to pump the laser, that's an average power of 20W. Of course the laser pumping
isn't 100% efficient, and 1 sec might not be the exact right time, it's still feasible. It's only the equivalent
energy of having the light bulb lit for a few seconds.

Comment Re:The amount of money.... (Score 1) 664

As if network television even has news.

And there are plenty of news sources that are not the interweb:
- your friends and cow-orkers
- radio
- newspaper

If they haven't gotten the news about the digital TV transition, how important can the news possibly be to these people? Turning off the signal is the only way to get them to notice. And if they still don't notice after that, why would they care? It's not like they are trying to watch TV.

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