After the Virginia Tech shootings the WBC threatened to protest the funerals. Some radio guy offered to let them have air time in exchange for not doing so.

As a friend of one of the people killed in those shootings I was very happy the family wouldn't go through this even if it resulted in a sick group like the WBC getting radio air time.

I think we would be serving the families of these new victims well by making some sort of similar compromise. I doubt anywhere near the number of people listened to that radio interview as would have seen the protests in the news, so I don't think it even helps the WBC cause at all.

Raid 0 is a real bad idea for backup, if one drive fails, your whole array goes down. A NAS is a good idea IMO, but you should not be using Raid 0. A better solution would be to use something like Raid 6 (which allows 2 drives to fail without loss of data http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_RAID_levels#RAID_6 ).

It's kind of useless to post this on Slashdot honestly. What good is it going to do? If you have an idea for how to solve this and are a researcher then talk to the NIH. Otherwise this is just a lot of hot air.

If the software is mature enough to be widely useful, then a company should try to commercialize it under and SBIR or an STTR or something. If it's not mature then it should stay what is is - a research prototype. Most research prototypes end up being useless in my experience and it's not worth the effort at all the try to pull them all together. If there are a bunch of useful ones like you seem to be claiming, then submit a grant and do something about it.

I absolutely agree that in many cases laptop bans can be helpful. Some people do actually use them to take notes, but the vast majority do not, and it is very distracting for the students who sit behind the laptop users. It's virtually impossible for your eyes not to be drawn to all the flashy lights and images flying by the computer screens in front of you as you try to pay attention to the lecture.

Ideally you could just ban laptop usage that was unrelated to the class, but that is very difficult to enforce and would be a strain on the professors time while they should be teaching.

It's part of an ongoing problem that schools do not yet know how to properly utilize technology in the classroom. Until they figure this out, technology can be a distraction instead of a benefit to students.

Water jet engines are not that expensive, and the pirates make a TON of money on ransom. They have built full towns just to house hostages, I think they can scrounge up a bit of money to buy a new engine. It's a small investment for a multi-million dollar ransom.

Who says this is publishable? Seems like some people having fun on a fractal forum. Interesting to look at, but probably not publishable in an academic sense.

I think it's debatable if using research facility workstations for FAH is a good use of taxpayer money. What about powering them down instead?

I have been wondering about power consumption of these distributed computing projects for a while. How do you justify the sheer amount of energy used to run these things?

SETI is a much more questionable use of power IMO, but Folding@home has not really shown to be enormously useful considering the amount of power it uses.

Why not put all the money used powering computers involved in FAH into innovative research grants instead? Granted this is logistically much harder than convincing people to install a program on their computer, but it would be much more effective in furthuring cancer research.