Have a concrete plan to feed yourself. Or save the schooling for retirement, after you've saved up enough to live on. Digging yourself a hundred thousand dollar hole isn't a great idea right out of the gate.
...
They're talking about science and engineering postdocs in the article, not humanities. Science and engineering postdocs are paid, just not very well, and science and engineering graduate students are also paid as well as having their tuition covered, so the point about debt is moot. Grad school and such in these disciplines is mostly about opportunity cost (years in your 20s potentially squandered) and potentially limiting your future career opportunities depending on your field and/or continued desire to remain in the academy.
This is just constructive or destructive interference of two beams of light, no different than a resonant-cavity photodiode, which has existed for 20 years. Lasing, if you recall, is stimulated emission, represented by one of Einstein's coefficients. The opposite physical process, which is the opposite Einstein coefficient, is absorption, which is always stimulated (there's no such thing as spontaneous absorption). We've long known about "anti-lasing"--it's called absorption.
In some of the news reports on this, I saw repeated references to the fact that "webOS can scale" or something to that effect. I don't know too much about webOS vs. Android vs. Chrome, but my guess here is that HP is buying Palm for tablets and MIDs, not for smartphones. I doubt HP has much desire to go against the HTCs and Samsungs of the smartphone world in hardware, and they're not naturally a software company (a la Google and Microsoft with their respective mobile OSs).
More likely, I would bet, is that HP has doubts that Android will scale well to tablets (current offerings in the market notwithstanding), with their relatively higher computing power than phones, and their experience with the Slate is probably indicating that Windows 7, despite being a good desktop OS, is not scaling too well down to the netbook level and below. Thus, they might be leaving open the option of pushing a tablet/MID level of computers based on webOS to compete with the iPad on iPhone OS.
And, if that doesn't work, as others have said, Palm has both a valuable name and lots of talented employees that can become HP's mobile arm, thus allowing them to have their asses covered and prevent shareholder panic.
Fascism? Maybe oligarchy would be more appropriate. Not sure how you end up subordinating your life to the state by having to buy health insurance. I'd say you, my friend, just violated Godwin's law.
"It's practically like the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. In any government system, performance decreases while costs rise."
Except that there is no such law, and you're using fallacious arguments to support your libertarian bias. Must be nice to be right all the time in that bubble you live in.
Re:A false choice, of course...
on
Health Care Reform
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
FYI, the reconciliation package removes all these "sweetheart deals." Filibuster reform will help prevent more of such deals, but considering the fact that most red states (I'm looking at you, Mississippi) get more back from the Federal government than taxes they pay in thanks to such earmarks and deals, I'd say neither party can take the high ground on that issue (the so-called sausage making of legislation).
Yeah! Race 'em to the bottom!?!? Or, maybe structure our government's trade laws to be more beneficial to American workers? And tax the IBM executives at a higher rate if they're going to be living in the comfort of the United States while making their money off the poor in the developing world and destroying the American middle class (whose provide soldiers, policemen, firemen, and the government that make living and running the company in the US so comfortable)?
George, there's an easy way to go back to the "good old days" before the prequels (if you haven't seen the 7-part, 1+-hour-long review of the Phantom Menace on youtube, go now and find it). Let somebody else direct them, and you just be a producer. It's clear that nobody on your staff is willing to contradict your "artistic vision," and thus we end up with crap results. Let somebody else direct, and then you throw in some criticism for a back-and-forth, and maybe these won't suck.
Here I've just gotten my head around Android, and now there's Chrome OS. Will someone please explain, why? Why would anyone bother with Chrome OS? I mean, weren't we just talking about a netbook with Android?
I get Android. It's the open-source, linux-type competitor to Windows Mobile and iPhone OS, being helped by Google's name and stature in the mobile market.
But Chrome OS? I understand netbooks will run slightly faster with linux or some lightweight variant than with Windows XP, but really, the hardware's the limitation here, not the OS. Taking a 4-cylinder Honda Civic and reducing the weight may give you better gas mileage and a slightly higher top speed, but we're not talking much, and certainly not enough to make me at least (and I like linux!) switch to linux on my Lenovo netbook. It's a netbook. It surfs the web. Learning a new OS for a netbook just doesn't have much appeal when my main system is still running Windows.
Owning a car costs far more than just your monthly loan payment. I had an old piece of junk which cost me just $1000 a year in insurance since I did not need comprehensive. My guess is that you're looking at least at $2000-3000 a year in insurance alone for a standard newish car (banks require comprehensive for anything they have a loan out for). Add to that a monthly payment for the car of say $300-400, which gives a total of $4000-5000 a year, and you're easily at the $12,600 estimate.
There's one major wildcard in your predictions--batteries (or mobile power solutions, in the case of things like methanol-based fuel cells). I think you're on the mark with respect to the home environment--laptops and off-site storage--since we're almost there now in major cities where bandwidth is plentiful (e.g., FiOS) and with people storing everything on gmail and photo sites.
The mobile landscape outside of the home, though, will be heavily dependent on how batteries develop. Without some breakthrough in power density and miniturization, we'll still be stuck with mobile devices like laptops and iPhones that are limited to 3 or 4 hours of use, which is just not enough to provide the reliability needed to really achieve the integration to which you refer because of people's cell phone needs. Plus, physically it's impossible to achieve the quality of a typical Canon digital camera with your mobile device because you need a retractable lens. So, I think for the moment, barring any clever innovations for improving cell phone cameras or lengthening battery life, the mobile device landscape in 2017 probably won't look too different than what we have now.
And, people won't want to pay twice for the computer they use in the home and on the go, so we'll still be using a laptop of some sort in 2017.
Motorola obviously won't be able to step up to the plate, but LG and Samsung might. It really depends on what they come up with. Apple's got the apps (iTunes) and the pretty user interface experience (Mac), but price is also a big factor in phones along with usability (it's got to function well as a phone, and phones undergo much more abuse than iPods through sheer use).
While I understand Jobs' reasoning for locking into Cingular (more control over the network to implement desired features), there's also a big danger in leaving a player as aggressive and with as large as a market as Verizon Wireless. You can't possibly think that Verizon and LG aren't working overtime to put out a competing device that will likely also be cheaper to stem the tide of users switching to Cingular. Time will tell, of course. It should be an interesting summer. I look forward to looking to changing my phone maybe in December or January, once the dust starts to settle.
Don't be an ass. Remember that energy derived from agricultural waste has a hefty component of solar as well. Agricultural waste is potentially an untapped resource because there's plenty of it that will just be left in the ground if we don't put it to use. It also has the potential to be a carbon-neutral energy source.
The "potential" in all of this comes, of course, from the need for fertilizer, which currently comes from petroleum. But that could also be taken care of by agricultural waste too, I imagine, given the right processing.
(paraphrasing) "Someday I'm gonna go back in time and kick this guy's ass."
It's one thing if these two sites post the same crackpot stories on the same day, but for god's sake, do some cross-referencing or something when they are such patently ridiculous articles and don't waste our time or space on the front page (spacetime even!).
Except the farmer with the tractor makes food, which I can eat to stay alive. The tractor-maker may invent a better tractor, which allows the farmer to make more food, so even though the tractor-maker does not make food, increased productivity still leads to more "wealth" in the form of food. If you include all elements of the system, meaning the sun as well, "wealth" is conserved, but since on Earth we can approximate the sun as infinite, there is always more wealth to be created (not to forget also that there is a bit of an integrating effect since reserves of oil in the ground are really saved-up sun energy).
However, the virtual character hunting virtual animals cannot feed my real-world belly with those virtual animal burgers. In the end, there's no wealth created inside the game, so it is just like day-trading. It requires more money from outsiders to keep it going, and in the end the company that runs the online game is the only one who will always win (i.e., in gambling terms, the "house"). In the overall context of the real world, the game is a service like any other, and "investors" in virtual property are providing a service to the gamers. In the end, though, the gamers must make their wealth from the real-world before paying it to the service providers.
Don't forget that there's a lot of information in the negative results. Perhaps that report from the AAAS has information on this, but I would be curious to know why the 4/5 of research projects were supposedly stopped due to patents. I'd bet that a similar number of research projects are not started since published material in scientific literature already exists.
Talking about a "chilling effect" makes for good heebie-jeebies in an article, but there's bound to be researchers that do not start research projects because much of the big work has already been done. Unless there's a really big profit on the horizon, once the "low-lying fruit" have been claimed, many researchers don't bother dealing with the details, because you're not going to get a Science article based on those. So, without knowing what stopped those 4/5, it's a big step to say the patent system is ruining research.
Also, remember that patents are only as good as the person writing them, and a large portion of them can be worked around rather easily by evading only a single claim. Also, patents only allow you to stop someone from making money on your invention, not from researching to improve an invention. If Big Company makes Widget 1.0, I can still make Widget 2.0 and patent the improvements. If those improvements are substantial enough, Big Company will want to make their own Widget 2.0, but then they'll have to license from me to do so, even though they made the original invention. In the end, the lawyers are the only definite winners, but without patents a big motivator for research would be gone.
If anything needs fixing, it's probably the area of biotech (patenting genes?!!! maybe we do need to invoke a creator...it'll be the prior art) and maybe software (say what you want, but 1-click checkout is an innovation, and if there truly is prior art, the patent and the company's $25,000 spent on getting it go pffft). Additionally, it would be good if the patent office maybe were more progressive in their pricing, allowing for some small business exemption or funding.
Cytotherapy? For something like this? Sounds like they couldn't stand up to the peer review of Nature or Science, even if this is not just a completely inaccurate story. It should tell you something when a giant discovery is announced through a lesser-known journal and the only news source you can find on it is WorldNetDaily, a B-"news" site if there ever was one.
So yet again, what the hell do the Slashdot "editors" actually do other than randomly his "yes" or "no" without any fact checking?
At least in part it is coming from a $100 million cut in the National Science Foundation research money. This is just typical congressional pork coming from the majority, not a new interest in pursuing real science.
IANAM, so I cannot really decipher the proof with any accuracy, but like any good Slashdot reader I will not hesitate to state my uniformed opinion.
It strikes me that there may be a problem since taking derivatives is involved. It seems like one might lose some valuable information by using derivatives to solve the equation since the zero-order term is lost.
Can a trained mathematician enlighten us on how this proof works?
"...the fact that they didn't have a woman as president before does not a gender biased institution make."
That would be a very powerful argument, if MIT were not actually historically gender-biased. It's not a fun fact to face up to, but both in student life and in treatment of professors, MIT has shown signs of gender-bias.
It's arguable that in student life, MIT has been less gender-biased and more a symptom of females being discouraged from following science and engineering. MIT was all-male until the 1960s, and since then, from what I can tell, the admissions officers have been trying to admit more women without shortchanging the men. However, having more men has meant different treatment, in student life and academics. For example, in student life, the residential system at MIT has been and still is heavily dominated by fraternities, which means the men have dictated much of how student life operates. That's just an example and not the whole story, of course, since student life is a complicated system.
In the treatment of professors, though, MIT admitted in a report in ?1999? that it found significant bias against female professors in many important areas, including assignment of lab space to new professors.
So, while I agree that MIT, like everyone else, should hire the best candidate, it is absolutely proper for the media to bring into the discussion MIT's previous gender bias and what the effects may be of having a female president for the first time at such an institution.
Slashdot Mirror
...
Have a concrete plan to feed yourself. Or save the schooling for retirement, after you've saved up enough to live on. Digging yourself a hundred thousand dollar hole isn't a great idea right out of the gate.
...
They're talking about science and engineering postdocs in the article, not humanities. Science and engineering postdocs are paid, just not very well, and science and engineering graduate students are also paid as well as having their tuition covered, so the point about debt is moot. Grad school and such in these disciplines is mostly about opportunity cost (years in your 20s potentially squandered) and potentially limiting your future career opportunities depending on your field and/or continued desire to remain in the academy.
This is just constructive or destructive interference of two beams of light, no different than a resonant-cavity photodiode, which has existed for 20 years. Lasing, if you recall, is stimulated emission, represented by one of Einstein's coefficients. The opposite physical process, which is the opposite Einstein coefficient, is absorption, which is always stimulated (there's no such thing as spontaneous absorption). We've long known about "anti-lasing"--it's called absorption.
Nothing to see here, move along.
In some of the news reports on this, I saw repeated references to the fact that "webOS can scale" or something to that effect. I don't know too much about webOS vs. Android vs. Chrome, but my guess here is that HP is buying Palm for tablets and MIDs, not for smartphones. I doubt HP has much desire to go against the HTCs and Samsungs of the smartphone world in hardware, and they're not naturally a software company (a la Google and Microsoft with their respective mobile OSs).
More likely, I would bet, is that HP has doubts that Android will scale well to tablets (current offerings in the market notwithstanding), with their relatively higher computing power than phones, and their experience with the Slate is probably indicating that Windows 7, despite being a good desktop OS, is not scaling too well down to the netbook level and below. Thus, they might be leaving open the option of pushing a tablet/MID level of computers based on webOS to compete with the iPad on iPhone OS.
And, if that doesn't work, as others have said, Palm has both a valuable name and lots of talented employees that can become HP's mobile arm, thus allowing them to have their asses covered and prevent shareholder panic.
Ding! Not without paying more taxes. Can't get something for nothing.
Fascism? Maybe oligarchy would be more appropriate. Not sure how you end up subordinating your life to the state by having to buy health insurance. I'd say you, my friend, just violated Godwin's law.
"It's practically like the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. In any government system, performance decreases while costs rise."
Except that there is no such law, and you're using fallacious arguments to support your libertarian bias. Must be nice to be right all the time in that bubble you live in.
FYI, the reconciliation package removes all these "sweetheart deals." Filibuster reform will help prevent more of such deals, but considering the fact that most red states (I'm looking at you, Mississippi) get more back from the Federal government than taxes they pay in thanks to such earmarks and deals, I'd say neither party can take the high ground on that issue (the so-called sausage making of legislation).
Yeah! Race 'em to the bottom!?!? Or, maybe structure our government's trade laws to be more beneficial to American workers? And tax the IBM executives at a higher rate if they're going to be living in the comfort of the United States while making their money off the poor in the developing world and destroying the American middle class (whose provide soldiers, policemen, firemen, and the government that make living and running the company in the US so comfortable)?
No, definitely the unions' fault.
George, there's an easy way to go back to the "good old days" before the prequels (if you haven't seen the 7-part, 1+-hour-long review of the Phantom Menace on youtube, go now and find it). Let somebody else direct them, and you just be a producer. It's clear that nobody on your staff is willing to contradict your "artistic vision," and thus we end up with crap results. Let somebody else direct, and then you throw in some criticism for a back-and-forth, and maybe these won't suck.
But smart money would be on them being terrible.
Here I've just gotten my head around Android, and now there's Chrome OS. Will someone please explain, why? Why would anyone bother with Chrome OS? I mean, weren't we just talking about a netbook with Android?
I get Android. It's the open-source, linux-type competitor to Windows Mobile and iPhone OS, being helped by Google's name and stature in the mobile market.
But Chrome OS? I understand netbooks will run slightly faster with linux or some lightweight variant than with Windows XP, but really, the hardware's the limitation here, not the OS. Taking a 4-cylinder Honda Civic and reducing the weight may give you better gas mileage and a slightly higher top speed, but we're not talking much, and certainly not enough to make me at least (and I like linux!) switch to linux on my Lenovo netbook. It's a netbook. It surfs the web. Learning a new OS for a netbook just doesn't have much appeal when my main system is still running Windows.
Owning a car costs far more than just your monthly loan payment. I had an old piece of junk which cost me just $1000 a year in insurance since I did not need comprehensive. My guess is that you're looking at least at $2000-3000 a year in insurance alone for a standard newish car (banks require comprehensive for anything they have a loan out for). Add to that a monthly payment for the car of say $300-400, which gives a total of $4000-5000 a year, and you're easily at the $12,600 estimate.
There's one major wildcard in your predictions--batteries (or mobile power solutions, in the case of things like methanol-based fuel cells). I think you're on the mark with respect to the home environment--laptops and off-site storage--since we're almost there now in major cities where bandwidth is plentiful (e.g., FiOS) and with people storing everything on gmail and photo sites.
The mobile landscape outside of the home, though, will be heavily dependent on how batteries develop. Without some breakthrough in power density and miniturization, we'll still be stuck with mobile devices like laptops and iPhones that are limited to 3 or 4 hours of use, which is just not enough to provide the reliability needed to really achieve the integration to which you refer because of people's cell phone needs. Plus, physically it's impossible to achieve the quality of a typical Canon digital camera with your mobile device because you need a retractable lens. So, I think for the moment, barring any clever innovations for improving cell phone cameras or lengthening battery life, the mobile device landscape in 2017 probably won't look too different than what we have now.
And, people won't want to pay twice for the computer they use in the home and on the go, so we'll still be using a laptop of some sort in 2017.
Motorola obviously won't be able to step up to the plate, but LG and Samsung might. It really depends on what they come up with. Apple's got the apps (iTunes) and the pretty user interface experience (Mac), but price is also a big factor in phones along with usability (it's got to function well as a phone, and phones undergo much more abuse than iPods through sheer use).
While I understand Jobs' reasoning for locking into Cingular (more control over the network to implement desired features), there's also a big danger in leaving a player as aggressive and with as large as a market as Verizon Wireless. You can't possibly think that Verizon and LG aren't working overtime to put out a competing device that will likely also be cheaper to stem the tide of users switching to Cingular. Time will tell, of course. It should be an interesting summer. I look forward to looking to changing my phone maybe in December or January, once the dust starts to settle.
Don't be an ass. Remember that energy derived from agricultural waste has a hefty component of solar as well. Agricultural waste is potentially an untapped resource because there's plenty of it that will just be left in the ground if we don't put it to use. It also has the potential to be a carbon-neutral energy source.
The "potential" in all of this comes, of course, from the need for fertilizer, which currently comes from petroleum. But that could also be taken care of by agricultural waste too, I imagine, given the right processing.
(paraphrasing) "Someday I'm gonna go back in time and kick this guy's ass."
It's one thing if these two sites post the same crackpot stories on the same day, but for god's sake, do some cross-referencing or something when they are such patently ridiculous articles and don't waste our time or space on the front page (spacetime even!).
No, it's a pole dance.
* Dollar bills at the ready *
"Apparently tickets are available..."
I think he meant "Obviously."
Except the farmer with the tractor makes food, which I can eat to stay alive. The tractor-maker may invent a better tractor, which allows the farmer to make more food, so even though the tractor-maker does not make food, increased productivity still leads to more "wealth" in the form of food. If you include all elements of the system, meaning the sun as well, "wealth" is conserved, but since on Earth we can approximate the sun as infinite, there is always more wealth to be created (not to forget also that there is a bit of an integrating effect since reserves of oil in the ground are really saved-up sun energy).
However, the virtual character hunting virtual animals cannot feed my real-world belly with those virtual animal burgers. In the end, there's no wealth created inside the game, so it is just like day-trading. It requires more money from outsiders to keep it going, and in the end the company that runs the online game is the only one who will always win (i.e., in gambling terms, the "house"). In the overall context of the real world, the game is a service like any other, and "investors" in virtual property are providing a service to the gamers. In the end, though, the gamers must make their wealth from the real-world before paying it to the service providers.
Don't forget that there's a lot of information in the negative results. Perhaps that report from the AAAS has information on this, but I would be curious to know why the 4/5 of research projects were supposedly stopped due to patents. I'd bet that a similar number of research projects are not started since published material in scientific literature already exists.
Talking about a "chilling effect" makes for good heebie-jeebies in an article, but there's bound to be researchers that do not start research projects because much of the big work has already been done. Unless there's a really big profit on the horizon, once the "low-lying fruit" have been claimed, many researchers don't bother dealing with the details, because you're not going to get a Science article based on those. So, without knowing what stopped those 4/5, it's a big step to say the patent system is ruining research.
Also, remember that patents are only as good as the person writing them, and a large portion of them can be worked around rather easily by evading only a single claim. Also, patents only allow you to stop someone from making money on your invention, not from researching to improve an invention. If Big Company makes Widget 1.0, I can still make Widget 2.0 and patent the improvements. If those improvements are substantial enough, Big Company will want to make their own Widget 2.0, but then they'll have to license from me to do so, even though they made the original invention. In the end, the lawyers are the only definite winners, but without patents a big motivator for research would be gone.
If anything needs fixing, it's probably the area of biotech (patenting genes?!!! maybe we do need to invoke a creator...it'll be the prior art) and maybe software (say what you want, but 1-click checkout is an innovation, and if there truly is prior art, the patent and the company's $25,000 spent on getting it go pffft). Additionally, it would be good if the patent office maybe were more progressive in their pricing, allowing for some small business exemption or funding.
Uh, it's in this week's Nature. That's a pretty important Journal.
Or, just get some Iodophor. There's a good article about Iodophor here: http://hbd.org/franklin/brewinfo/iodophor.html.
Iodine does quite a good job at sanitizing, and at 12.5 ppm needed for sanitization, it's well under the taste threshold.
Cytotherapy? For something like this? Sounds like they couldn't stand up to the peer review of Nature or Science, even if this is not just a completely inaccurate story. It should tell you something when a giant discovery is announced through a lesser-known journal and the only news source you can find on it is WorldNetDaily, a B-"news" site if there ever was one.
So yet again, what the hell do the Slashdot "editors" actually do other than randomly his "yes" or "no" without any fact checking?
At least in part it is coming from a $100 million cut in the National Science Foundation research money. This is just typical congressional pork coming from the majority, not a new interest in pursuing real science.
IANAM, so I cannot really decipher the proof with any accuracy, but like any good Slashdot reader I will not hesitate to state my uniformed opinion.
It strikes me that there may be a problem since taking derivatives is involved. It seems like one might lose some valuable information by using derivatives to solve the equation since the zero-order term is lost.
Can a trained mathematician enlighten us on how this proof works?
"...the fact that they didn't have a woman as president before does not a gender biased institution make."
That would be a very powerful argument, if MIT were not actually historically gender-biased. It's not a fun fact to face up to, but both in student life and in treatment of professors, MIT has shown signs of gender-bias.
It's arguable that in student life, MIT has been less gender-biased and more a symptom of females being discouraged from following science and engineering. MIT was all-male until the 1960s, and since then, from what I can tell, the admissions officers have been trying to admit more women without shortchanging the men. However, having more men has meant different treatment, in student life and academics. For example, in student life, the residential system at MIT has been and still is heavily dominated by fraternities, which means the men have dictated much of how student life operates. That's just an example and not the whole story, of course, since student life is a complicated system.
In the treatment of professors, though, MIT admitted in a report in ?1999? that it found significant bias against female professors in many important areas, including assignment of lab space to new professors.
So, while I agree that MIT, like everyone else, should hire the best candidate, it is absolutely proper for the media to bring into the discussion MIT's previous gender bias and what the effects may be of having a female president for the first time at such an institution.