Bingo.  When you spend enough time looking at the sky, even without a telescope if you aren't presently distracted by all the high tech shit in Western society (live for a few decades in a 3rd world country where there are no city lights clouding the sky), you'll see things a different way.  Mayans, Egyptians, and Sumerians got pretty goddamn accurate with their "astrology" if you ask me.

It's like if I were to say I can't see with my ears.  Ask a blind person.

At the end of the 17th century, new scientific concepts in astronomy (such as heliocentrism) began to damage the credibility of astrology, which subsequently lost its academic and theoretical standing. Astrology saw a popular revival in the 19th and 20th centuries as part of a general revival of spiritualism and later New Age philosophy, and through the influence of mass media such as newspaper horoscopes.[3]

While astrology may bear a superficial resemblance to science, it is a pseudoscience because it makes little attempt to develop solutions to its problems, shows no concern for the evaluation of competing theories, and is selective in considering confirmations and dis-confirmations

I'd bet money astrology isn't bogus.

And, I'd bet a lot of it.

Did your horoscope tell you that you would come into a lot of money or something?

Honestly... it's utter hogwash! Nothing more than pompous pseudoscience. There is nothing that astrology explains that astronomy, a proper scientific field, cannot explain with greater clarity and precision, minus all the supernatural drippings.


Astrology is not what you mean.

Astrology is all about crap like horoscopes and predicting effects on the earth caused by the orientation of the stars and the constellations and blah blah blah. As in, 'you are especially fertile on the 3rd tuesday of february because the constellation of orion intersects perpendicularly with your ball sac' ... etc.

Astronomy is the scientific study of celestial bodies, you know... with telescopes, and math, and all those fancy supercomputers.
Astrologists on the other hand have crystal balls, tarot cards and jackasses who claim to have 'psychic' powers.

I'd bet money astrology isn't bogus.

And, I'd bet a lot of it.

Astrologist, yup that's what i mean, the science/study of stars.

Your list of symptoms threw me off.  I found it odd.  But, then again, maybe it was intended to be humorous.

Schizophrenia is about an excess of dopamine and responding to "internal stimuli."  Symptoms of schizophrenia are divided into two subtypes:  positive and negative symptoms (not "good" and "bad," but rather symptoms that either cause an excess or absence of typical functioning).  

For example, a positive symptom of schizophrenia may be laughing without an appropriate external cue to make the person laugh.  A negative symptom might be catatonia.  Positive symptoms are the things we typically think about when we think of schizophrenia such as auditory and visual hallucinations (e.g. if you hear funny voices, that may cause you to laugh).

Antipsychotic medications are designed to treat the positive symptoms and often do so successfully (or they at least cause a significant reduction of positive symptoms).  Conversely, negative symptoms are basically untreated by antipsychotic medications and are typically seen as more debilitating.  

Antipsychotics are split into two subtypes:  typical and atypical antipsychotics.  Typical antipsychotics were the first generation of antipsychotics (e.g. Haldol) while atypical antipsychotics (e.g. clozapine) are the 2nd generation of antipsychotics.  While both subtypes primarily treat positive symptoms only, and while there is (generally) no difference in general efficacy of either generation of antipsychotics, the atypical antipsychotics are generally purported to be safer and have decreased levels of side effects such as tardive diskenesia (though they usually do not eliminate the side effects completely).

Now you know  

From what I was told, the machines I am interested in using are often used for sha256 hashing.

Yes.  I am not sure of the exact computational power of the machines I am interested in using.  It actually may be a very poor estimation because I am guessing based on petaflop output which, to my knowledge, is more or less irrational.

Regardless, it's a shit-ton of power.

I have a motherboard with a single PCIe x16 slot.  If I buy a PCIe x16 extender cable and attach it between my PCIe x1 slot and a 2nd graphics card, can I expect a drop in hash rate with either graphics card?

Your assumption about ensuring the security of the machines is correct.  You could say I'm trying to hide the machines from others who might wish to steal.

And yes, I hope to learn a lot from this whether I succeed or fail.