Nope. What you are thinking of is called "staying the same". Every change, every single little change, is going to require retraining.

And if you don't invest in nokia, it definitely won't pay off.

Medical accelerators, materials research, heat-shrink tubing. There are a lot of possibilities for real commercial use of accelerators. TFS mentioned some 30k commercial accelerators already in use. Maybe you should ask the people running them what they are using them for. If you make them cheaper and more available, the uses can only expand.

You can blame the CERN Director-General for that one. Just about everyone else thought that the press release/conference nonsense was pretty poorly handled. But when the Director-General says jump, everyone else says "how high?".

I hope it doesn't make your math teacher pull her hair out. If so, she isn't very good at algebra (or recognizing where simple algebraic manipulation is applicable).

I actually got that one wrong, because I misread the division sign as an addition sign. (47*75) + 25 is a very different number... Guess I need to get my eyes checked.

Unfortunately, Commerce Clause.

Banking on the assumption that laws not currently enforced will never be enforced doesn't sound to me like especially sound business practice...

It's a lot cheaper on the small scale to build towers and put them on a meatrack than to get rackmount chassis et al. A *lot* cheaper.

The real breakdown there is whether or not you are paying for datacenter space too. If you have to pay for power, HVAC, etc out of your budget, then yes, rent from the cloud. If you're like most small research groups, you're part of a larger university or industry department, and you're already paying building overhead costs, which include some sort of server room space. For that sort of budget, I'd be astonished if you needed more than about 10 tiles of server room space, and probably a lot less than that. This is extremely workable in the sort of environment I described.

About a year ago, my research group (I'm a grad student in high-energy physics at a major American university) received 30k$ in supplemental funding via the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. I used the money to build our group a 39-node (156 core * hyperthreading) compute cluster. For that price, we could have rented 94 days of 156 small EC2 instances. If you try to factor in maintenance and development time, you can get a little bit longer of course, but I certainly spent less than a year's worth of work on it, so you'd less than double the EC2 rental length at grad student pay rates...

More technical details: HEP is embarrassingly parallel tasks with IO needs ranging from very heavy to very light, and with fairly large data storage needs. I bought commodity desktop hardware (core i7 930, fairly cheap X58 chipset mobos, low-end name-brand memory, mid-range PSUs, cheap as near free chassis, 1.5TB WD HDD per node), and a 48-port Cisco gigabit switch (with our IO throughput needs for some jobs, and the OS install scheme, didn't want to skimp at all on the networking). We already had a general purpose server machine (file, NIS, electronic logbook, etc), which became the headnode.

Each node PXE boot + NFSROOT from the headnode, which reduces the maintenance dramatically. The disks in each node contain swap and data storage, and are tied together with Hadoop's HDFS or gfarm (admittedly, this part is still in flux, because extremely high inter-node network traffic causes nodes to hang spontaneously.... Still working on that aspect) which will, when/if it works, give us much greater data throughput by eliminating the bottleneck to the headnode for data.

If you'd like to chat more about building a small compute cluster on a shoestring budget according to this sort of model, please feel free to email me at jay ess double-u at eff enn ay ell dot gov.

Well shoot. I guess I'll just go hide under the bed now.

How many times have we invented away the looming Malthusian catastrophe, mostly just to satisfy our own greed? I think we will again, and I'd rather take that grand chance than cower in fear that we might offend Gaia.

Somebody on here once said, and I agree with them, "I like living in a country where the poor people are fat."

Because DEX was my dump stat, my parents had a standing agreement with the school(s, elementary, junior high, high) that I could type any assignment rather than handwriting it. Even as a physics grad student, I still typed my problem sets (in LaTeX, of course).

I might do that, if it could emulate vim.

The Kindle DX has a screen size of 9.7".

On the other hand, I have been hit (as a pedestrian, and only a glancing blow, but it still hurt) by a cyclist who was running a red light, riding on the wrong side of the road, and who failed to stop and render aid. When I lived closer to the local university in the undergraduate ghetto, I regularly had to stop my car while driving quite normally and legally down a narrow one-way street so as to avoid running over the cyclists coming the wrong way down the middle of the street. In the same neighbourhood, my wife pulled up to a stop sign and stopped (again on a one-way street). A cyclist coming down the cross street decided that he need to turn the wrong way down that street, didn't look, nearly plastered himself on the hood of her stationary car, and then stopped, gave her the finger, and stood in the road cussing her out. There're assholes everywhere, pedestrians and cyclists included. Perhaps Tucson possesses a uniquely law-abiding cyclist culture.