Polverone

This is an honest question, not a troll or an invitation to flame: what's so great about XP? XP's appearance may be customizable; I've only used it at school, where almost everything is locked down so I can't tweak anything. But the default that I see on my roommate's computer and in the labs at school is a bright mix of primary colors that would be at home in a daycare center or a backyard swimming pool. Appearance aside, what advantages does it hold over Win 2K? Win 2K's as stable as any version of Windows I've ever used; I've crashed it only 2 or 3 times in the last 18 months. That seems to be about the same crash rate as my roommate's experienced under XP. I understand there's some sort of system versioning/recovery built in to XP, but when my roommate tried to use it to recover from some bad drivers it didn't help her. XP's Windows Product Activation is a real deterrent for me. I don't think Microsoft is going to use this feature for Eeevill, but it's still annoying if you frequently swap hardware in your machine. So that's why I'm not impressed by XP; what sort of benefits have I missed?

There's Pro/Engineer, Maya, Softimage XSI, Houdini, Photorealistic Renderman, Mental Ray, and Amazon Paint in the modeling/graphics/rendering department, IBM DB/2 and Oracle in databases, AMBER, Gaussian, and dozens of others in computational chemistry, Mathematica, Maple, and Matlab in mathematics... The only areas I'd say where linux lacks high-end apps are video and sound editing. But maybe I'm forgetting some categories. It does lack many popular applications, of course. The one that bugs me most is Photoshop, because the Gimp just isn't as UI consistent/fast and I can't afford Amazon Paint. I find day to day use of Linux to be very nice. Installing new software/hardware can be a real PITA, depending on the exact circumstances. OS X is nice but runs on somewhat overpriced hardware. Windows 2000 is pretty nice and runs on inexpensive hardware. XP is Windows 2000 as imagined by Big Brother and color-schemed by Big Brother's 4 year old sister. Linux can be a pain to configure but is very nice to use day to day... and it's free (not that most people I know pay for commercial software anyway). So linux is my fave but I'd recommend a new iMac with OS X or a midrange PC with Win 2K almost anyone apart from those who'd like to learn a new environment for its own sake.

Chemical patents often disclose just enough to make certain processes protected, not enough to actually succeed at producing the subject of the patent. Nevertheless, if you are interested in nerve agents, see British patents 1,346,409 and 1,346,410 and US patent 3,911,059, all available online from espacenet.net. I have more patent numbers around here somewhere, but can't seem to find them at the moment. Check the Merck Index entries on nerve agents - they have patent and journal references. And that book I put up has a lot of good information even if it's not specifically about VX.

Opens fine for me with Acrobat 5.0.5 - maybe the minor version number is important too.

It doesn't have detailed weapon-production information, but I think that you will enjoy Some aspects of the chemistry and toxic action of organic compounds containing phosphorus and fluorine, made available by yours truly. http://bcis.pacificu.edu/~polverone/PF.html

This is only an approximation to the true pH, but it works well in many situations: pH = pKa + log([base]/[acid]) So in your case, divide the concentration of lactate by the concentration of lactic acid, take the log of that, and add it to the pKa of lactic acid to obtain the pH.