I have a revolutionary idea... hear me out. If soda companies would distribute drinks in glass bottles - pretty thick bottles so they're tough and hard to break - and include a "deposit" surcharge when the beverage was purchased, then when the customer returned the empty bottle they would get the deposit back. Then the softdrink company could sterilize the bottle and reuse it over and over!
Which is exactly why I'm sceptical. We used to have a system of reusing bottles. We still pay the deposit. But the grocery stores no longer participate. You have to take your bottles and cans to local recycling centers which are inconveniently located and have awkward hours of operations. It isn't worth it so hardly anyone does it except for the homeless. If we can't get keep a depost-return program going for soda bottles, how is this going to work for pint size ice cream which isn't remotely as popular?
They sell out almost immediately. I've been trying to buy for the last three days. I've been to seven stores. Nobody has them. I could order them online but I need one now, not next week. When you figure what overnight shipping costs, $5 for a mask isn't a bad deal.
Everyone's always willing to complain, but yet they continually want cheaper and cheaper flights
What cheaper flights? In the US, at least, flights are getting more expensive and more cramped and with more extra fees.
What I see happening is sneaky inflation. The base fare stays more or less the same but the ticket is less usable. To get back to where you were you have to pay more. We approaching the point where I may be forced to pay for "premium" economy. This is big problem because those seats are typically 50% more expensive for often less than one inch of extra knee room.
The screen is 3.3 inches. That is pretty similar to the 3.5" of a Iphone 4s. This isn't a tiny phone at all. It is modernized version of the size all smart phones used to be before they turned into battleships. It's a bit more compact owing to an edge to an edge screen making better use of the real estate than the old phones did.
you have to wonder if there's some convergent evolution going on as well.
Given an earth-like planet, several billion years, and the same sort of 'events' that life on earth has seen -- is it unlikely that evolution would arrive at something strikingly similar to what we have on earth?
Yes, if only for the reason of time variance. 65 million years ago (a rather short time on the cosmological scale), the dominant forms of life on land were dinosaurs. Maybe ten million years before that and no flowering plants. Even Earth has only been "earth-link" for a small portion of its history. And many of the big events were pretty random so even in the unlikely event the planets started as the same, the time between events is going to vary radically.
You know there are other sectors of the global economy besides tech, right?
Yes, but where else is there a regular pattern of disruption that allows startups to thrive? Restaurants and fashion are the only ones that come to mind. Fashion is fairly weak as the money is mostly in the barely disrupted manufacturing and retail sides. Restaurants aren't very profitable and few of these "startups" get past the small business stage.
It looks like app developers are using the upcoming release as a good time to abandon IOS 9.74, which is the best you get for any device released before 2013. 2012 iPads are still pretty useful other than that problem.
Both the article and the summary but not the actual paper make the claim that the only birds to survive were flightless. The actual paper talks about the demise of arboreal species. This makes sense as it is difficult for a tree-dwelling species to survive if the trees have gone. It does not follow that the survivors were necessarily flightless. Today most ground-dwelling species retain the ability to fly. And many of these have long, sturdy legs. Given that these kinds of birds don't tend to fly much, it is reasonable that many of these would adapt to a purely flightless lifestyle in the absence of predation. It does not follow that birds had to learn to fly all over again. Even if it took hundreds to thousands of years for the forests to recover, there should still be populations that retain flight ability allowing them to radiate back into the trees quickly.
So, we have a "food" produced by insects that humans have not consumed until now. Since humans have never eaten it before, it may or may not be fully suitable for human needs. It does, however, have a high concentration of some specific nutrients that humans need.
But actually harvesting the food from insects is difficult so they want to engineer yeast to produce it.
So, if you need to create an artificial "bio factory" to create the substance, why not skip the cockroach step and engineer the yeast to produce a substance that either we know is useful for humans because humans already eat it, or a substance designed to be useful to humans?
Or is genetic engineering just not that sophisticated yet and the best we can do is cut and paste a DNA sequence from cockroaches and hope it does it the same thing in yeast?
If a human with no prior knowledge is only given data showing rooster crowing when the sun rises, the human will not be able to distinguish cause and effect either. The only reason actual humans know better is because we spent a couple of decades collecting lots and lots of data, some though experience, some taught by others. Collectively, it has taken society millennia to sort out things like this. You really can't expect to train an AI with a fraction of a single human's intelligence (if any at all) to learn in a few weeks what has taken humanity thousands of years.
The basis of "GNU" was re-implementing Bell Lab's Unix. Extending Stallman's logic, if Linux is derived from GNU, and GNU was derived from Unix, the whole mess is the result of work done at Bell Labs, so it should take precedence over "GNU" in the name.
It already does. The "ux" in "Linux" refers to Unix. If Linus's kernel were something completely new or he did not want to acknowledge the debt to Unix, it might be called LinOS.
Has any individual ever been audited for not declaring Use Tax? I know that it's nominally a requirement, but I know of exactly zero people who actually do so and exactly zero people who have ever been audited because of it.
Businesses do. Individuals not so much unless their purchases are large. Generally speaking, audits only happen when the suspected fraud is large and the revenue service is likely to win. For most individuals, use tax is just not big enough to trigger an audit. if I were doing other things that were likely to trigger an audit, I would be more concerned about use tax.
People who attend Ivy League schools earn more than their non -Ivy counterparts
C!=C. Students that are accepted by Ivy League schools but choose to enroll elsewhere, do just as well as those that do enroll. So the evidence is that these schools are not better at educating, but just good at attracting applicants and filtering admissions.
Not necessarily. The students at Ivy League schools tend to come from wealthy, well-connected families. If they do just as well by not attending an Ivy League school, it may just mean that coming from a wealthy and well-connected family is sufficient advantage that going to an Ivy League school doesn't change much. The students that stand to gain the most from an elite education may very well be the very poor students who don't generally apply.
Doesn't matter. They won't darken at all in a car. The react to UV and the windshield blocks UV. This is the same way that photosensitive eyeglasses work. If, like me, you only wear glasses when driving, the photosensitivity is completely useless.
Couldn't the meteorite just be part of the Earth that was knocked loose when a huge rock smashed into and created the moon?
Mars meteorites are determined because their oxygen isotope ratios match that found on Mars and don't match that normally found on Earth. If the isotope ratios in these meteorites (perhaps of carbon since we talking about diamonds) are atypical of Earth then it stands to reason they came from somewhere else. It could still have come from the collision that created the Moon though. The object that hit the Earth is thought to have been about the size of Mars.
OK, I admit there was alot of hype in 1999 about Y2K but there were alot of programmers working on it. We will just never know how bad it would have been if it was just left as is.
Yes, actually, we do, within some bounds. The hype was that power would go off, cars wouldn't start, and it would be the end of days. That was just plain stupid since critical real-time systems generally do not work with dates. If absolutely nothing had been fixed, billing and financial systems, in general, would have been pretty messed up. The recession might have hit eighteen months early and might have been deeper. But most modern technology would ride on through.
In the 1990's they had a larger store across from the Sunnyvale Fry's of that time. The expected computer gear was mixed in seldom seen industrial devices. I remember walking in and finding an electron microscope for sale. I bought a logic analyser there that must have been a dozen years old when I bought it yet was still capable for contemporary designs. I shudder to think what it must have cost when new.
The more recent location is remote from everything. It isn't a place you can drop in and look around because you happened to be next door. Once there, it is just computer gear, very little of which is interesting.
Read Verne; right up your alley. And it's "wary" ("leary" works, too; "weary" does not).
Really, "weary" reads fine to me if unusual, but does mean something different than "wary" or "leary". It means literally being tired of it. And, no, I'm not the OP.
I wonder how the bottle was sealed. If it was a cork, I'm surprised that it didn't rot or leak after 130 years.
It wasn't sealed when they found it. The message survived because it was buried in sand.
From TFA: (npr and bbc)
The bottle probably arrived on the western shores of Australia within a year of being thrown overboard, the research report stated. There, it is "likely to have spent the majority of its life buried within a layer of damp sand to have remained so well preserved, with a period of recent exposure allowing its fortuitous discovery by the finders."
Maybe it's just me, but I struggle to see the point of Optane as compared to a regular flash-based SSD. From what. I can see, it's optimised as a high speed but small SSD that can then be used as a cache for a spinning HDD. In the benchmarks I've seen however, it doesn't seem to be markedly faster than a fast M.2 NVMe SSD.
It is on the wrong interface speaking the wrong protocol. It needs to be connected to the DDR interface for the low latency, fast writes, and word-unit access of 3D-Xpoint to shine. But we are still waiting for that product. When the first NVMe Optane came out, many watchers thought that it indicated some yield issues that more complex and higher latency NVMe interface could cover up but that would make it difficult to make a DDR connected device functional. Maybe Intel is still having trouble.
Slashdot Mirror
I have a revolutionary idea... hear me out. If soda companies would distribute drinks in glass bottles - pretty thick bottles so they're tough and hard to break - and include a "deposit" surcharge when the beverage was purchased, then when the customer returned the empty bottle they would get the deposit back. Then the softdrink company could sterilize the bottle and reuse it over and over!
Which is exactly why I'm sceptical. We used to have a system of reusing bottles. We still pay the deposit. But the grocery stores no longer participate. You have to take your bottles and cans to local recycling centers which are inconveniently located and have awkward hours of operations. It isn't worth it so hardly anyone does it except for the homeless. If we can't get keep a depost-return program going for soda bottles, how is this going to work for pint size ice cream which isn't remotely as popular?
They sell out almost immediately. I've been trying to buy for the last three days. I've been to seven stores. Nobody has them. I could order them online but I need one now, not next week. When you figure what overnight shipping costs, $5 for a mask isn't a bad deal.
My thoughts exactly.
Everyone's always willing to complain, but yet they continually want cheaper and cheaper flights
What cheaper flights? In the US, at least, flights are getting more expensive and more cramped and with more extra fees.
What I see happening is sneaky inflation. The base fare stays more or less the same but the ticket is less usable. To get back to where you were you have to pay more. We approaching the point where I may be forced to pay for "premium" economy. This is big problem because those seats are typically 50% more expensive for often less than one inch of extra knee room.
Oh, right. They already thought of that.
The screen is 3.3 inches. That is pretty similar to the 3.5" of a Iphone 4s. This isn't a tiny phone at all. It is modernized version of the size all smart phones used to be before they turned into battleships. It's a bit more compact owing to an edge to an edge screen making better use of the real estate than the old phones did.
you have to wonder if there's some convergent evolution going on as well.
Given an earth-like planet, several billion years, and the same sort of 'events' that life on earth has seen -- is it unlikely that evolution would arrive at something strikingly similar to what we have on earth?
Yes, if only for the reason of time variance. 65 million years ago (a rather short time on the cosmological scale), the dominant forms of life on land were dinosaurs. Maybe ten million years before that and no flowering plants. Even Earth has only been "earth-link" for a small portion of its history. And many of the big events were pretty random so even in the unlikely event the planets started as the same, the time between events is going to vary radically.
You know there are other sectors of the global economy besides tech, right?
Yes, but where else is there a regular pattern of disruption that allows startups to thrive? Restaurants and fashion are the only ones that come to mind. Fashion is fairly weak as the money is mostly in the barely disrupted manufacturing and retail sides. Restaurants aren't very profitable and few of these "startups" get past the small business stage.
It looks like app developers are using the upcoming release as a good time to abandon IOS 9.74, which is the best you get for any device released before 2013. 2012 iPads are still pretty useful other than that problem.
Both the article and the summary but not the actual paper make the claim that the only birds to survive were flightless. The actual paper talks about the demise of arboreal species. This makes sense as it is difficult for a tree-dwelling species to survive if the trees have gone. It does not follow that the survivors were necessarily flightless. Today most ground-dwelling species retain the ability to fly. And many of these have long, sturdy legs. Given that these kinds of birds don't tend to fly much, it is reasonable that many of these would adapt to a purely flightless lifestyle in the absence of predation. It does not follow that birds had to learn to fly all over again. Even if it took hundreds to thousands of years for the forests to recover, there should still be populations that retain flight ability allowing them to radiate back into the trees quickly.
So, we have a "food" produced by insects that humans have not consumed until now. Since humans have never eaten it before, it may or may not be fully suitable for human needs. It does, however, have a high concentration of some specific nutrients that humans need.
But actually harvesting the food from insects is difficult so they want to engineer yeast to produce it.
So, if you need to create an artificial "bio factory" to create the substance, why not skip the cockroach step and engineer the yeast to produce a substance that either we know is useful for humans because humans already eat it, or a substance designed to be useful to humans?
Or is genetic engineering just not that sophisticated yet and the best we can do is cut and paste a DNA sequence from cockroaches and hope it does it the same thing in yeast?
If a human with no prior knowledge is only given data showing rooster crowing when the sun rises, the human will not be able to distinguish cause and effect either. The only reason actual humans know better is because we spent a couple of decades collecting lots and lots of data, some though experience, some taught by others. Collectively, it has taken society millennia to sort out things like this. You really can't expect to train an AI with a fraction of a single human's intelligence (if any at all) to learn in a few weeks what has taken humanity thousands of years.
The basis of "GNU" was re-implementing Bell Lab's Unix. Extending Stallman's logic, if Linux is derived from GNU, and GNU was derived from Unix, the whole mess is the result of work done at Bell Labs, so it should take precedence over "GNU" in the name.
It already does. The "ux" in "Linux" refers to Unix. If Linus's kernel were something completely new or he did not want to acknowledge the debt to Unix, it might be called LinOS.
Has any individual ever been audited for not declaring Use Tax? I know that it's nominally a requirement, but I know of exactly zero people who actually do so and exactly zero people who have ever been audited because of it.
Businesses do. Individuals not so much unless their purchases are large. Generally speaking, audits only happen when the suspected fraud is large and the revenue service is likely to win. For most individuals, use tax is just not big enough to trigger an audit. if I were doing other things that were likely to trigger an audit, I would be more concerned about use tax.
People who attend Ivy League schools earn more than their non -Ivy counterparts
C!=C. Students that are accepted by Ivy League schools but choose to enroll elsewhere, do just as well as those that do enroll. So the evidence is that these schools are not better at educating, but just good at attracting applicants and filtering admissions.
Not necessarily. The students at Ivy League schools tend to come from wealthy, well-connected families. If they do just as well by not attending an Ivy League school, it may just mean that coming from a wealthy and well-connected family is sufficient advantage that going to an Ivy League school doesn't change much. The students that stand to gain the most from an elite education may very well be the very poor students who don't generally apply.
I've owned two pairs. Neither reacted to visible light. I even asked about this last time and the shop didn't have any that reacted to visible light.
Doesn't matter. They won't darken at all in a car. The react to UV and the windshield blocks UV. This is the same way that photosensitive eyeglasses work. If, like me, you only wear glasses when driving, the photosensitivity is completely useless.
Couldn't the meteorite just be part of the Earth that was knocked loose when a huge rock smashed into and created the moon?
Mars meteorites are determined because their oxygen isotope ratios match that found on Mars and don't match that normally found on Earth. If the isotope ratios in these meteorites (perhaps of carbon since we talking about diamonds) are atypical of Earth then it stands to reason they came from somewhere else. It could still have come from the collision that created the Moon though. The object that hit the Earth is thought to have been about the size of Mars.
I use "Malware Depot" for my mobile hotspot.
OK, I admit there was alot of hype in 1999 about Y2K but there were alot of programmers working on it. We will just never know how bad it would have been if it was just left as is.
Yes, actually, we do, within some bounds. The hype was that power would go off, cars wouldn't start, and it would be the end of days. That was just plain stupid since critical real-time systems generally do not work with dates. If absolutely nothing had been fixed, billing and financial systems, in general, would have been pretty messed up. The recession might have hit eighteen months early and might have been deeper. But most modern technology would ride on through.
In the 1990's they had a larger store across from the Sunnyvale Fry's of that time. The expected computer gear was mixed in seldom seen industrial devices. I remember walking in and finding an electron microscope for sale. I bought a logic analyser there that must have been a dozen years old when I bought it yet was still capable for contemporary designs. I shudder to think what it must have cost when new.
The more recent location is remote from everything. It isn't a place you can drop in and look around because you happened to be next door. Once there, it is just computer gear, very little of which is interesting.
Read Verne; right up your alley. And it's "wary" ("leary" works, too; "weary" does not).
Really, "weary" reads fine to me if unusual, but does mean something different than "wary" or "leary". It means literally being tired of it. And, no, I'm not the OP.
Are house prices declining as a result of this?
I'm pretty sure it is in one case.
I wonder how the bottle was sealed. If it was a cork, I'm surprised that it didn't rot or leak after 130 years.
It wasn't sealed when they found it. The message survived because it was buried in sand.
From TFA: (npr and bbc)
The bottle probably arrived on the western shores of Australia within a year of being thrown overboard, the research report stated. There, it is "likely to have spent the majority of its life buried within a layer of damp sand to have remained so well preserved, with a period of recent exposure allowing its fortuitous discovery by the finders."
Right, because bouncing the clocks around twice a year is not confusing at all.
Changing the clocks is confusing twice a year. Having different time than neighboring states is confusing for at least five months per year.
Maybe it's just me, but I struggle to see the point of Optane as compared to a regular flash-based SSD.
From what. I can see, it's optimised as a high speed but small SSD that can then be used as a cache for a spinning HDD.
In the benchmarks I've seen however, it doesn't seem to be markedly faster than a fast M.2 NVMe SSD.
It is on the wrong interface speaking the wrong protocol. It needs to be connected to the DDR interface for the low latency, fast writes, and word-unit access of 3D-Xpoint to shine. But we are still waiting for that product. When the first NVMe Optane came out, many watchers thought that it indicated some yield issues that more complex and higher latency NVMe interface could cover up but that would make it difficult to make a DDR connected device functional. Maybe Intel is still having trouble.