I suspect future earnings potential. A couple hundred acres of good farmland, if cared for, can be used to make the owner money from now till whenever: if they put a lot of work into it, mind you, not like it's just sitting there earning interest. Also, it's a limited edition thing: they aren't making more of it. Well, slowly anyway, geology takes a while.
Something else to consider - the land is likely to be mortgaged to to gills to pay for the really pricey equipment needed to farm these days. Farm equipment makes exotic cars look cheap in comparison (fun non-sequitor fact: saw more Lamborghini tractors on the road in rural Italy than sports cars).
Many of the same arguments on income vs. net worth apply to most small business owners. It takes a lot of $$ to get the infrastructure to run whatever enterprise they're running, and it's enough to support a few jobs. But, it's not particularly liquid infrastructure: cash out the land or the pizza oven or whatever, and no more jobs or production.
The structure of University research is a huge part of this. Researchers don't care about truth or quality of their research. They care about keeping their jobs and their pay, which means several things:
Speak for yourself. As a practicing University Researcher, I greatly care about truth and the quality of my research.
I've got a job which pays me to do really cool stuff that I care about. Poor quality research doesn't get me that job: why on earth would I mess with a good thing by doing a bad job?
For what it's worth, I've probably published more papers where the null hypothesis wins than not. Way more work and less satisfying to get a good upper limit, but it is what it is.
Actually, this is the first thing to come out of Government in a while that actually makes senses... and I generally lean pretty libertarian.
Net access has a lot of parallels with other utilities (large infrastructure costs means little competition). In the case of phone companies, it's almost a one-for-one swap anyway: land lines are going the way of the dodo, but many of us now mostly use network packets for phone calls anyway (both actual voip phones and skype-like services).
One can argue whether utility regulation itself is a good or bad thing: but network service quacks and waddles an awful lot like a utility-shaped duck, any way you slice it.
Am I alone in finding any of this news? I dropped out of academia almost 20 years ago (best decision I ever made, also one of the more difficult ones) and it was clear then to anyone who could do simple arithmetic that most of us (post-docs) wouldn't get faculty positions.
Yes, definitely Not News. When I went off to investigate grad school (in astrophysics) 25 years ago, departments I was applying too explicity warned me "look, odds that you'll get a long-term job in the field are slim if you go down this path". That's academics warning away potential customers of their grad programs: so the problem was bad enough even them for ethics to trump self interest.
Nor can you predict what will be in demand when you graduate: academia is a fickle beast, and fields go in and out of fashion in less time than it takes for the typical PhD. So study what you love, because you love it. That way, and only that way, will you win.
This! In spades (and, this was exactly what those people telling me there were few jobs said next). It happened to work out for me (sort of, I do experimental particle physics now instead of real astrophysics).
But even my friends who didn't get as lucky as I did aren't unemployed or flipping burgers. If you can get a PhD in astro- or particle physics, you've got some useful skills that transfer nicely to working in the real world. Most all of which pay way better than being an academic. So again, my career works only because I love it: not because I wanted to get rich.
The Scion is marketed to younger people and trimmed a bit hotter. The Subaru is marketed to older people and has things like heated seats and automatic climate control.
The WRX? That's the rally car version with an amazing power/weight ratio and all wheel drive to get that power to the rubber. Not exactly the Oldsmobile demographic.
FWIW, heated seats match up well with all wheel drive, you're living in a snowy place if you buy this car, regardless of age.
On the contrary, it's a well thought out experiment using some clever and not terribly expensive techniques. The "holographic universe" thing is a flashy attention grabbing headline, but if you bothered to go read up on the details, you'd see that it's simply a good way to look at the consistency of spacetime on scales people haven't yet explored. I, for one, would love to know if spacetime is lumpier than expected, regardless of what you care to call it.
Also, last week's "hints beyond the standard model" article was slashdot clickbait, not actual science news.
So, worthy reader, "how about doing some actual article reading, like the guys on Slashdot do?" Oh, wait, I see....
I'm a bit biased, but consider finding non-zero neutrino mass (via neutrino oscillations) as the first "beyond the standard model" evidence. Slashdot carried that story in its infancy, way back in 1998.
Also worth pointing out that TFA is talking about an experiment in construction that hopes to push the g-2 result past 5 sigma. It's not there yet, although 4.something sigma is still pretty darn good. Just 14 years late to the party.
If you're a highway warrior for the forseeable future your best bet is diesel. Electric power-trains truly show their strength in city driving due to the ability to regenerate from braking. On the highway the savings are too marginal.
I've been wondering how come there's not a diesel hybrid. Get the diesel goodness on the highway, the electric bonus in the city: make use of both strengths! Not like locomotives haven't been doing this for the last hundred years or anything...
Of course, I also wonder how come pneumatic hybrids aren't being developed more (I think Citroen is the only one out there). Storing energy as compressed air is more efficient than in batteries (which don't deal well with with high inrush currents), and don't have the "nasty chemical battery pack" issues.
But you can't say "scientists have a pretty good idea" about planetary formation.
I wasn't saying that: just that we've got a reasonable window into the thermal budget of the Earth at the present time. Looking back in the thread, that's what you opened up being worried about.
When the Borexino experiment was being built (under the Appenines in Italy), they calculated that if a nuclear sub parked for more than a couple weeks in the same spot in the Adriatic, they'd be able to see it using neutrinos.
Not sure if anyone's redone that calculation now that the experiment works, but the preliminary one attracted some interest from the defense side of things.
There is a reasonably well thought out set of specs for "if DoD wants to use neutrino detectors to monitor nuke activity in, say North Korea, what would they have to build". Done from the perspective of the particle physics guys saying "if we can get DoD to spend some of its semi-infinite pile of cash on some neutrino detectors we're interested in, how would we do it?". The answer turns out to be almost feasible, actually. Here's only the most recent paper I bumped across, there are many others.
Researchers don't "know" squat. They have lots of theories, none of which have supporting data. That's what makes the heat of the Earth's core a mystery. By all rights it should not be this hot. It should be dead cold like the moon.
How about "scientists have a pretty good idea". Here's a recent review article on geoneutrinos, which does compare direct neutrino observations and the overall heat budget.
Don't know everything, but the more tools you can turn on the problem, the more clear things become. Adds up to something a bit more than "squat".
Sure we do. We haven't yet seen neutrinos from each step of the process (still need to confirm the small fraction of CNO process), but all the other ones have been found. The sun works as advertised (to something a bit less than the 10% error level).
While this would result in graduates who really knew their stuff, I'm afraid the pressure is in the opposite direction. Administrators lean on faculty to increase the institution's "4-year graduation rate". Because legislators lean on them, because the public leans on the legislators. John Q. Public wants what he's paying for, a four year degree in four years, dammit! (despite the fact that an Engineering curriculum really is five years worth of stuff: it used to be here, and still is in much of the world). Given the current huge tuition rates, certainly that's understandable though: if penny wise and pound foolish.
Some people can learn what they need in less time than others. Some subjects are harder than others. But, everyone and every subject unfortunately has to be mashed into the same timeframe.
Of course, why it's ok for the "professional" careers (as if Engineer or Scientist isn't) you mention to require more schooling is a baffling exception. Good for those fields: they get the time to teach stuff thoroughly!
If dark matter only reacts to gravity, why doesnt collapse into hgh density clumps over the eons? Ordinary matter is stopped from doing this by the electronmagnetic repulsion of atoms for masses less than a few hundred Jupiters and by hadronic stong force for less than couple Suns.
It does, we call those clumps "galaxies".
Note that the virtue of interacting only a little bit with normal stuff (via only the weak and gravitational forces, not gravity alone) actually makes it harder for dark matter to pack in tightly. Why? it's hard for a distribution of dark matter particles to shed kinetic energy and settle down more deeply into the gravitational potential well. Ordinary matter has all sorts of electromagnetic ways to shed energy and cool down.
If this thermal argument is opaque, imagine one WIMP, with some kinetic energy. It falls down towards the center of a galaxy. But, it seldom interacts to lose any energy, so zooms right back out the other side. Sort of a tiny, frictionless pendulum with a galaxy sized amplitude.
Why don't they just site their centers up north? Here in Duluth, most of the year the outside air is cooled for free by mother nature. Heck, they could sell their waste heat to nearby homes and businesses and get a negative PUE.
Don't need to be green to worry about this, it's $$, something ever company wants.
However, a thorny engineering problem would be stopping the tons of antimatter holding up the platform from interacting with the normal matter around it. If it did, *boom*. That's the way you can get 100% of the "E" out of the "m" in E=mc^2.
So many poorly executed steps backwards... up2date replaced by yum
Heh - I always considered "up2date" to be the original awful college laptop pandering move, and rejoiced when yum got capable enough to replace it. yum+rpm does a pretty good job of package management. yum's scripted and configurable. up2date relied on users having a throbbing blinky thing on their desktop and taking action in a way which was spookily similar to Windows Update, plus it had a bad habit of taking all your memory and CPU in the process.
the abominable excrescence that is Network Manager on a wired machine...
On the other hand, I cannot agree with you more about this. Unfortunately, this happened long enough ago that Network Manager has since also infected RHEL and derivative server distros, which is even sillier. Step #1 on server installs for me is to rip it out by the roots, something which solves many problems (and should be the default install).
Since the first two produce neutrons they will create considerably more low-level nuclear waste/J than a fission plant would, meaning they'll only be in use until we can manage aneutronic fusion instead.
I don't think it will be much of a problem. Fission waste is primarily the heavy daughters of the uranium: take that thing way up on the periodic table and split it semi-randomly in two parts, you get all sorts of stuff of varying nastyness. Now take that soup of middle-sized atoms and throw more neutrons at it, more problems.
However, if all you've got is a bunch of H and He isotopes in there fusing, tacking on more neutrons to them doesn't do much. Also, the neutrons released in these reactions don't have a whole lot of energy, so don't get very far. Much less of a problem.
This is similar to the autonomous glider the people at the Large Lakes Observatory use to get data from something that's not moored in one place like research bouys are. The unit here in Duluth cruises around Lake Superior for a few weeks at a time, but they're standard equipment for oceanographers in bigger, saltier puddles too.
It uses the same means of propulsion: turning up-and-down motion into forward motion with wings. Its power source, however, is some onboard batteries rather than a solar cell limiting its endurance (but freeing it from dragging around the solar rig, so it can go deeper and faster). All the battery does is change the volume of a swim bladder, causing the glider to float or sink. Amazing efficient!
Why can't more companies act this way towards one another?
A cynical take on why lawyers don't usually act like this: the purpose of law and lawyers is to resolve conflicts. By doing so in a jerky way, they ensure more future conflicts, ergo, job security.
That said, these guys resolved this conflict in the best way possible, kudos to them: hope they don't get disbarred for it or anything!
it also means that it wouldn't be too hard for [a very skilled person] to work out how to un-encrypt military drones and spoof them
Jam? Sure. But one of the reasons millitary grade hardware is so expensive redundant systems, take one out, you can still function. In this case, very good interial navigation systems.
But "not very hard" to break military grade encryption on something as vital as the defense channel from GPS satellites... if that's easy we've got bigger problems than rogue drones. They're not using WEP, after all.
I personally think people over-A/C most data centers (computers really don't care if it gets kind of warm; they only really care about temperatures that their human slaves would object to), but in these places... well, I hope you're friends with Carrier.
I've never understood why data centers aren't built exclusively in cold-weather locations. I live in Duluth, MN, and if we turn on our AC (for humans) more than about a week a year it's considered an awful heat wave. During the majority of the year, all the heat being pulled from the servers could be used to provide heat for nearby humans, something they're paying for anyway.
So: pay for the electricity (from whatever source) only once (to power the boxes), instead of twice (power the boxes and the compressors to remove the heat). Then, sell that waste heat to someone else. Plenty of bandwidth up here, property is cheap, cost of living is low, most all the tech people we graduate at this university have to move elsewhere to find a job (and many would rather stay), so the labor is here. What am I missing?
I agree with everything you posted BTW and would only add the thing that finally broke me was how bad later releases ran on AMD CPUs. I don't know if they are using the Intel Cripple Compiler or what but the performance difference between AMD and Intel CPUs when it came to FF was pretty startling, with my losing a good 30-40 minutes on the battery using FF on my E-350 compared to using Comodo Dragon or QTWeb, both of which seem to be CPU agnostic.
Interesting... The older machine I've had the most problems with newer FFs has an old AMD chip. I'd figured it for memory footprint till I dropped in a couple more GB, hadn't considered the CPU.
But, it's not the Intel compiler, as the problem is worst on Fedora, which builds the binaries themselves using gcc.
Slashdot Mirror
I suspect future earnings potential. A couple hundred acres of good farmland, if cared for, can be used to make the owner money from now till whenever: if they put a lot of work into it, mind you, not like it's just sitting there earning interest. Also, it's a limited edition thing: they aren't making more of it. Well, slowly anyway, geology takes a while.
Something else to consider - the land is likely to be mortgaged to to gills to pay for the really pricey equipment needed to farm these days. Farm equipment makes exotic cars look cheap in comparison (fun non-sequitor fact: saw more Lamborghini tractors on the road in rural Italy than sports cars).
Many of the same arguments on income vs. net worth apply to most small business owners. It takes a lot of $$ to get the infrastructure to run whatever enterprise they're running, and it's enough to support a few jobs. But, it's not particularly liquid infrastructure: cash out the land or the pizza oven or whatever, and no more jobs or production.
The structure of University research is a huge part of this. Researchers don't care about truth or quality of their research. They care about keeping their jobs and their pay, which means several things:
Speak for yourself. As a practicing University Researcher, I greatly care about truth and the quality of my research.
I've got a job which pays me to do really cool stuff that I care about. Poor quality research doesn't get me that job: why on earth would I mess with a good thing by doing a bad job?
For what it's worth, I've probably published more papers where the null hypothesis wins than not. Way more work and less satisfying to get a good upper limit, but it is what it is.
Actually, this is the first thing to come out of Government in a while that actually makes senses ... and I generally lean pretty libertarian.
Net access has a lot of parallels with other utilities (large infrastructure costs means little competition). In the case of phone companies, it's almost a one-for-one swap anyway: land lines are going the way of the dodo, but many of us now mostly use network packets for phone calls anyway (both actual voip phones and skype-like services).
One can argue whether utility regulation itself is a good or bad thing: but network service quacks and waddles an awful lot like a utility-shaped duck, any way you slice it.
Am I alone in finding any of this news? I dropped out of academia almost 20 years ago (best decision I ever made, also one of the more difficult ones) and it was clear then to anyone who could do simple arithmetic that most of us (post-docs) wouldn't get faculty positions.
Yes, definitely Not News. When I went off to investigate grad school (in astrophysics) 25 years ago, departments I was applying too explicity warned me "look, odds that you'll get a long-term job in the field are slim if you go down this path". That's academics warning away potential customers of their grad programs: so the problem was bad enough even them for ethics to trump self interest.
Nor can you predict what will be in demand when you graduate: academia is a fickle beast, and fields go in and out of fashion in less time than it takes for the typical PhD. So study what you love, because you love it. That way, and only that way, will you win.
This! In spades (and, this was exactly what those people telling me there were few jobs said next). It happened to work out for me (sort of, I do experimental particle physics now instead of real astrophysics).
But even my friends who didn't get as lucky as I did aren't unemployed or flipping burgers. If you can get a PhD in astro- or particle physics, you've got some useful skills that transfer nicely to working in the real world. Most all of which pay way better than being an academic. So again, my career works only because I love it: not because I wanted to get rich.
The Scion is marketed to younger people and trimmed a bit hotter. The Subaru is marketed to older people and has things like heated seats and automatic climate control.
The WRX? That's the rally car version with an amazing power/weight ratio and all wheel drive to get that power to the rubber. Not exactly the Oldsmobile demographic.
FWIW, heated seats match up well with all wheel drive, you're living in a snowy place if you buy this car, regardless of age.
On the contrary, it's a well thought out experiment using some clever and not terribly expensive techniques. The "holographic universe" thing is a flashy attention grabbing headline, but if you bothered to go read up on the details, you'd see that it's simply a good way to look at the consistency of spacetime on scales people haven't yet explored. I, for one, would love to know if spacetime is lumpier than expected, regardless of what you care to call it.
Also, last week's "hints beyond the standard model" article was slashdot clickbait, not actual science news.
So, worthy reader, "how about doing some actual article reading, like the guys on Slashdot do?" Oh, wait, I see....
I'm a bit biased, but consider finding non-zero neutrino mass (via neutrino oscillations) as the first "beyond the standard model" evidence. Slashdot carried that story in its infancy, way back in 1998.
Also worth pointing out that TFA is talking about an experiment in construction that hopes to push the g-2 result past 5 sigma. It's not there yet, although 4.something sigma is still pretty darn good. Just 14 years late to the party.
If you're a highway warrior for the forseeable future your best bet is diesel. Electric power-trains truly show their strength in city driving due to the ability to regenerate from braking. On the highway the savings are too marginal.
I've been wondering how come there's not a diesel hybrid. Get the diesel goodness on the highway, the electric bonus in the city: make use of both strengths! Not like locomotives haven't been doing this for the last hundred years or anything...
Of course, I also wonder how come pneumatic hybrids aren't being developed more (I think Citroen is the only one out there). Storing energy as compressed air is more efficient than in batteries (which don't deal well with with high inrush currents), and don't have the "nasty chemical battery pack" issues.
But you can't say "scientists have a pretty good idea" about planetary formation.
I wasn't saying that: just that we've got a reasonable window into the thermal budget of the Earth at the present time. Looking back in the thread, that's what you opened up being worried about.
When the Borexino experiment was being built (under the Appenines in Italy), they calculated that if a nuclear sub parked for more than a couple weeks in the same spot in the Adriatic, they'd be able to see it using neutrinos.
Not sure if anyone's redone that calculation now that the experiment works, but the preliminary one attracted some interest from the defense side of things.
There is a reasonably well thought out set of specs for "if DoD wants to use neutrino detectors to monitor nuke activity in, say North Korea, what would they have to build". Done from the perspective of the particle physics guys saying "if we can get DoD to spend some of its semi-infinite pile of cash on some neutrino detectors we're interested in, how would we do it?". The answer turns out to be almost feasible, actually. Here's only the most recent paper I bumped across, there are many others.
Researchers don't "know" squat. They have lots of theories, none of which have supporting data. That's what makes the heat of the Earth's core a mystery. By all rights it should not be this hot. It should be dead cold like the moon.
How about "scientists have a pretty good idea". Here's a recent review article on geoneutrinos, which does compare direct neutrino observations and the overall heat budget.
Don't know everything, but the more tools you can turn on the problem, the more clear things become. Adds up to something a bit more than "squat".
Sure we do. We haven't yet seen neutrinos from each step of the process (still need to confirm the small fraction of CNO process), but all the other ones have been found. The sun works as advertised (to something a bit less than the 10% error level).
While this would result in graduates who really knew their stuff, I'm afraid the pressure is in the opposite direction. Administrators lean on faculty to increase the institution's "4-year graduation rate". Because legislators lean on them, because the public leans on the legislators. John Q. Public wants what he's paying for, a four year degree in four years, dammit! (despite the fact that an Engineering curriculum really is five years worth of stuff: it used to be here, and still is in much of the world). Given the current huge tuition rates, certainly that's understandable though: if penny wise and pound foolish.
Some people can learn what they need in less time than others. Some subjects are harder than others. But, everyone and every subject unfortunately has to be mashed into the same timeframe.
Of course, why it's ok for the "professional" careers (as if Engineer or Scientist isn't) you mention to require more schooling is a baffling exception. Good for those fields: they get the time to teach stuff thoroughly!
If dark matter only reacts to gravity, why doesnt collapse into hgh density clumps over the eons? Ordinary matter is stopped from doing this by the electronmagnetic repulsion of atoms for masses less than a few hundred Jupiters and by hadronic stong force for less than couple Suns.
It does, we call those clumps "galaxies".
Note that the virtue of interacting only a little bit with normal stuff (via only the weak and gravitational forces, not gravity alone) actually makes it harder for dark matter to pack in tightly. Why? it's hard for a distribution of dark matter particles to shed kinetic energy and settle down more deeply into the gravitational potential well. Ordinary matter has all sorts of electromagnetic ways to shed energy and cool down.
If this thermal argument is opaque, imagine one WIMP, with some kinetic energy. It falls down towards the center of a galaxy. But, it seldom interacts to lose any energy, so zooms right back out the other side. Sort of a tiny, frictionless pendulum with a galaxy sized amplitude.
Why don't they just site their centers up north? Here in Duluth, most of the year the outside air is cooled for free by mother nature. Heck, they could sell their waste heat to nearby homes and businesses and get a negative PUE.
Don't need to be green to worry about this, it's $$, something ever company wants.
Sure, in principle.
However, a thorny engineering problem would be stopping the tons of antimatter holding up the platform from interacting with the normal matter around it. If it did, *boom*. That's the way you can get 100% of the "E" out of the "m" in E=mc^2.
Do you know why we think N. Korea has WMD?
Because we've watched them blow up nukes on seismographs?
Not that this wasn't posturing too: but it's pretty cut and dried, unlike Iraq where everyone simply figured there was no way they didn't have them.
So many poorly executed steps backwards... up2date replaced by yum
Heh - I always considered "up2date" to be the original awful college laptop pandering move, and rejoiced when yum got capable enough to replace it. yum+rpm does a pretty good job of package management. yum's scripted and configurable. up2date relied on users having a throbbing blinky thing on their desktop and taking action in a way which was spookily similar to Windows Update, plus it had a bad habit of taking all your memory and CPU in the process.
the abominable excrescence that is Network Manager on a wired machine...
On the other hand, I cannot agree with you more about this. Unfortunately, this happened long enough ago that Network Manager has since also infected RHEL and derivative server distros, which is even sillier. Step #1 on server installs for me is to rip it out by the roots, something which solves many problems (and should be the default install).
Since the first two produce neutrons they will create considerably more low-level nuclear waste/J than a fission plant would, meaning they'll only be in use until we can manage aneutronic fusion instead.
I don't think it will be much of a problem. Fission waste is primarily the heavy daughters of the uranium: take that thing way up on the periodic table and split it semi-randomly in two parts, you get all sorts of stuff of varying nastyness. Now take that soup of middle-sized atoms and throw more neutrons at it, more problems.
However, if all you've got is a bunch of H and He isotopes in there fusing, tacking on more neutrons to them doesn't do much. Also, the neutrons released in these reactions don't have a whole lot of energy, so don't get very far. Much less of a problem.
This is similar to the autonomous glider the people at the Large Lakes Observatory use to get data from something that's not moored in one place like research bouys are. The unit here in Duluth cruises around Lake Superior for a few weeks at a time, but they're standard equipment for oceanographers in bigger, saltier puddles too.
It uses the same means of propulsion: turning up-and-down motion into forward motion with wings. Its power source, however, is some onboard batteries rather than a solar cell limiting its endurance (but freeing it from dragging around the solar rig, so it can go deeper and faster). All the battery does is change the volume of a swim bladder, causing the glider to float or sink. Amazing efficient!
Why can't more companies act this way towards one another?
A cynical take on why lawyers don't usually act like this: the purpose of law and lawyers is to resolve conflicts. By doing so in a jerky way, they ensure more future conflicts, ergo, job security.
That said, these guys resolved this conflict in the best way possible, kudos to them: hope they don't get disbarred for it or anything!
Bleh - I even previewed that post. "interial" -> "inertial".
it also means that it wouldn't be too hard for [a very skilled person] to work out how to un-encrypt military drones and spoof them
Jam? Sure. But one of the reasons millitary grade hardware is so expensive redundant systems, take one out, you can still function. In this case, very good interial navigation systems.
But "not very hard" to break military grade encryption on something as vital as the defense channel from GPS satellites... if that's easy we've got bigger problems than rogue drones. They're not using WEP, after all.
I personally think people over-A/C most data centers (computers really don't care if it gets kind of warm; they only really care about temperatures that their human slaves would object to), but in these places... well, I hope you're friends with Carrier.
I've never understood why data centers aren't built exclusively in cold-weather locations. I live in Duluth, MN, and if we turn on our AC (for humans) more than about a week a year it's considered an awful heat wave. During the majority of the year, all the heat being pulled from the servers could be used to provide heat for nearby humans, something they're paying for anyway.
So: pay for the electricity (from whatever source) only once (to power the boxes), instead of twice (power the boxes and the compressors to remove the heat). Then, sell that waste heat to someone else. Plenty of bandwidth up here, property is cheap, cost of living is low, most all the tech people we graduate at this university have to move elsewhere to find a job (and many would rather stay), so the labor is here. What am I missing?
I agree with everything you posted BTW and would only add the thing that finally broke me was how bad later releases ran on AMD CPUs. I don't know if they are using the Intel Cripple Compiler or what but the performance difference between AMD and Intel CPUs when it came to FF was pretty startling, with my losing a good 30-40 minutes on the battery using FF on my E-350 compared to using Comodo Dragon or QTWeb, both of which seem to be CPU agnostic.
Interesting... The older machine I've had the most problems with newer FFs has an old AMD chip. I'd figured it for memory footprint till I dropped in a couple more GB, hadn't considered the CPU.
But, it's not the Intel compiler, as the problem is worst on Fedora, which builds the binaries themselves using gcc.