China will simply move the cheap manufacturing to Africa.
No need. Cheap labor is still available in the interior of China. It is only the well developed coastal cities that are getting expensive (relatively).
Africa isn't even next in line. That would be India along with Vietnam and Cambodia (although really only India counts. Vietnam and Cambodia are small countries whose cheap labor can be quickly exhausted)
TFA is, unfortunately, very brief and doesn't talk about this distinction but not all conceptions result in births. Embryos are often reabsorbed without the mother even being aware. I would expect the number of mutations at birth to be lower than the number at conception because those with more and more serious mutations are never born.
Since Facebook will give an account to anybody, there is no privacy difference for the user between "everybody with a Facebook account" and "everyone with or without a Facebook account" However, for Facebook itself there is a difference. If they allow Google to spider and publish "public" data then Facebook loses their exclusive right to profit from user supplied data. Facebook has an economic interest in making as much data as possible public but not accessible to Google.
I have personally known many people who smoke because they *think* it helps suppress appetite. In fact they often justify the cost by claiming they save on food. I've always assumed this is one of the many reasons young females choose to smoke.
I haven't heard the part about saving money on food. That's a bit bizarre. It's not unreasonable to think that smoking helps people to lose weight though. Nicotine is a known appetite suppressant and it is also a stimulant. So eat less and burn more.
I have heard from those that tried to quit, gained weight, and used that as an excuse to resume smoking.
If it is found that that most of the weight loss is from the additives and not from the nicotine, then it might convince some of the vanity smokers to give it up. Why smoke if you can get same weight control effect from an over the counter pill that doesn't leave tar if your lungs?
When I was younger (and nerdier) I once proposed a similar but more sensible version using in-universe technology that was well understood by Starwars fans: force fields. Obviously, starships have shields that keep asteroids, debris, weapons and projectiles from damaging them. Similarly, speeders and various devices apply forces at a distance to hover and float. Why can't this technology be used to harness a plasma field as a cutting device?
Because force fields are just as improbable as light sabers and for a lot of the same reasons. Force fields are more widely employed in sci-fi but that doesn't make them any closer to the reality we actually live in.
And don't give me the "radio interference" crap - there's no evidence at all to support this and it's routinely ignored by anybody in the industry.
How many times do you have to be told that the point is to make sure you pay attention to what is happening around you since take off and landing is when the plane and you are most vulnerable.
Actually, pretty much nobody is saying that except you and for good reason: It doesn't make any sense. The instructions are specifically to "put away all electronic devices", not "put away all distractions". They don't mention and don't seem to care about books, mechanical toys, etc. While rubik's cubes are rather uncommon distractions, books are not and yet passengers are never instructed to put away reading materials. This despite the fact that a good book can be every bit as distracting as a laptop computer.
I would hope these devices have a good warranty. Flash has limited write endurance and writes are slow too. Cache operation is all about concentrated writes and rewrites. Cache is just about the worst application possible for flash.
I don't think I'll ever understand why people consider noisiness in a keyboard to be a feature. I consider it to be a bug. It's distracting when people around you are trying to concentrate. It's annoying and inconsiderate. I shouldn't have to wear earplugs around you just to get my work done.
I'll gladly turn in my geek card if it means I can get some peace and quiet while I work. Have fun with your nostalgia on your own time; please don't force me to partake of it, too.
Click keyboards were the result of manufacturers exploiting a misunderstanding of their customers. Mechanical keyboards with good travel tended to be noisy relative to spongy membrane keyboards. Discerning but confused customers would seek out keyboards with a noticeable click. Manufacturers responded by making keyboards that clicked louder than necessary. Often the feel wasn't even very good. They keyboard was just noisy.
A good mechanical keyboard isn't necessarily loud at all. My all time favorite was the Apple IIe keyboard. Light, smooth travel, and virtually noiseless. The travel was also shorter distance than the IBM keyboards which made typing quicker but it still had that effortless movement down to solid bottom that typifies the best mechanical keyboards.
Dropbox, subversion, time machine, snapshots - it is just that we have more solutions now than back in the days, and you have to pick one.
Not the same thing. Version control systems are manual. They only kick in when you deliberately access the version control system.
File versions are automatic. You get a new version every time you save a file, not the next time you commit, not at the next backup but now. And it applies system wide, not just to those key structures that have in a version control repository.
There are some down sides:
Directories get a bit noisy with all the revisions around. It also eats disk space, although that isn't nearly the issue that it used to be.
You want universities to not accept CS students because they didn't take a programming course in high school?
Well id be fucked because my high school didn't offer any programming besides "Web Programming".
So if a student comes from a school that cant afford a real programming course then they just aren't good enough for you? Fuck you. Prick.
Other programs, like Electrical Engineering, start at a level that not everyone is ready for. If you aren't ready for calculus, then you will have to take remedial classes to bring you up to speed on algebra, geometry, and trigonometry. The majority of students, who *are* ready, don't need to waste time being taught what they already know.
I don't see why a Computer Science program could not start assuming that students already know the basics of operating computers and have rudimentary experience writing programs. Those who are not ready can take remedial classes outside the degree program or even outside the school. Why should the students who are ready have their time wasted?
This move is designed to 'force heavy data users to find a better phone vendor'
Nah. That's being taken care of. T-Mobile is being borged into AT&T. Sprint will be soon be extinguished or merged out of existence.
Verizon and AT&T will join together in the monetization of data users. The unlimited plans were just a temporary measure to get their users hooked. Now the surviving duopoly will apply frighteningly expensive overuse fees to encourage their addicts to pay out big bucks for large plans. It worked so well for voice. Did you expect anything else?
but since when has memory footprint been a "benchmark?" Really, we're talking roughly half a gig here, and who's running these on a system without at least 2?
Most netbooks are 1GB. half a gig is a lot just to run the desktop on a machine like that.
Whenever work was slow, we'd fire up Doom on the Sparc Station 10's and 20's. It was one of the very few games available for Sun machines. Whenever I got my own SS10 at home, I did fire up Doom a time or two but never really got into it. I'm not much of a gamer. I think Quake was available for Sun when it came out, too but I never ran it.
The individual nantennas can absorb close to 90 percent of the available in-band energy.
Which is good for communications, where you want to exclude all but the target band. It could even work for power, providing the light source is a laser. But resonance methods aren't very good for capturing energy from broad spectrum sources like the sun.
I predict that this technique will never gain traction for solar energy. However, it might replace photodiodes for fiber optic communications.
The Solar Challenger did a 262km international flight from England to France in 1981. Given that the Solar Impulse has a max speed of 50km/h (from TFA) and was in the air almost 13 hours, that suggests a flight in the neighborhood of 600km. Not bad but then, one would expect some progress after 30 years.
Given the same lens projecting the same image circle, a larger sensor that is still within the image circle will have more light hitting it than a smaller sensor.
True. But that sensor will capture a different image, making the comparison meaningless. Once you crop the image down so it is the same as the small sensor's image the advantage disappears.
And "Pay for reliability, not mileage. On a car, you'll spend more of repairs and maintaince over its lifetime than you will on a difference in gas." needs to re-think that when faced with $6-$8 a gallon gas prices. At $6 a gallon, 20mpg is going to cost you $30,000.00 in gas over 100,000 miles. At 40mpg you save $15,000.00
Think of how many people bought their cars when gas prices were half what they were today. When buying a car today, you have to keep in mind that history tends to repeat itself.
Indeed. I think most people estimate fuel cost based on current prices. That's shows ignorance of economics and history. Unless you are planning to keep your car for only a very short time, you can bank on gas prices being substantially higher when you sell the vehicle than they are today. When I bought my civic early in 2006, I estimate average fuel prices over the 10 year span I expected to own the vehicle at $5/gallon. Current prices were about $2.50/gallon. I am now thinking my estimate was a bit low but not so far off that the hybrid would have been a better deal. I just don't drive that much.
Taking risks can mean bigger success or bigger failure. Focusing on the stand out successes doesn't tell the whole story. Winning big always requires taking big risks. But that doesn't mean that everyone would benefit from such behavior. There is a reason why conformity is in our genes. On average, it a better strategy. You might not become the tribal leader but, with help of your buddies, you are less likely to be eaten by a bear. In this age, you might not make CEO, but you are less likely to be laid off and more likely to get help finding a new job if you are.
The proposed “Transportation Opportunities Act” would mandate a vehicle miles traveled (VMT) tax that’s calculated by installing electronic equipment on each car and at filling stations. VMT calculation and payment would take place electronically every time you buy gas at the pump.
It won't be soon but, at some point, enough cars will be electric that we will need an alternative to the fuel tax. But electric cars don't go to filling stations which makes a mileage tax based on visits to filling stations kind of pointless. It's a lot more complex than the fuel tax and it is even less accurate. Fuel taxes account for the fact that larger vehicles, which cause more damage to the roads per mile, also burn more fuel per mile.
As others have said, it is a lot simpler to just raise the fuel tax. Actually, I don't understand why the fuel tax is a fixed value anyway. If it were a % of the purchase price like ordinary sales taxes, then revenue should stay fairly level as prices rise and usage drops.
Ideas and problems get tossed around that don't necessarily get aired or aired to the same people in formal meetings. In my last company, some of the most important ideas came out of the lunchtime banter. Unfortunately, as the company grew, it became more compartmentalized. People's schedules became more constrained by other people in their respective groups. It was harder to get a lunch crew together. People in the same group would often lunch together but without the exchange of ideas across groups it wasn't as useful.
How does this advance the Republican goal of balancing the budget?
Funny thing: Changing NASA's direction is actually pretty cheap. There is a lot of paperwork and studies to do but that's a lot cheaper than building the hardware committed to in the last change of direction. Now there is still the issue of building the newly requested hardware but that won't happen until long after the next election.
Who employs most people in the world? Greedy people. Who makes most of the goods and services in the world? Greedy people.
Recent evidence suggests that the effective harnessing of greed and greedy people for the greater good is breaking down. In a well run capitalistic system, greedy people give jobs and wealth to many as they pursue personal wealth. Unfortunately, greedy people have found they can more easily create personal wealth if they sharply reduce the jobs and wealth they spread around (offshoring). Others have figured out how to generate great personal wealth without creating anything of value at all. (high frequency trading, housing bubble)
Left to their own devices, devious greedy people will simply recreate feudalism: hoarding the wealth for themselves and leaving the peasants to starve.
While I agree that a hologram projection would be kinda cool (though a street chase won't seem right in my living room), stereoscopic vision is what makes our brains think in 3D, if you will. Stereoscopic images are simply trying to provide exactly what your brain interprets as 3D.
Not quote. Stereoscopic vision is part of what makes our brains think in 3D. We also sense 3D by adjusting focus. This doesn't work with the simple stereoscopic 3D. Parallax tells our brain that the image is 3D. Focus says that it is flat. That conflict creates eye strain, headaches, etc and it isn't going away with any technology currently offered to consumers.
it means the time from unemployed without notice to having a job was a day.
Yeah, so? You didn't like the terms. Big deal. You still had a paycheck and you didn't have to explain away the unsightly gap on your resume. You also didn't have to worry about your resume being filtered out for the gap without you getting a chance to explain it.
My last full time job, along with the entire company, disappeared in 48 hours. No severance No warning. No chance to get my resume circulating before the axe came.
Slashdot Mirror
China will simply move the cheap manufacturing to Africa.
No need. Cheap labor is still available in the interior of China. It is only the well developed coastal cities that are getting expensive (relatively).
Africa isn't even next in line. That would be India along with Vietnam and Cambodia (although really only India counts. Vietnam and Cambodia are small countries whose cheap labor can be quickly exhausted)
TFA is, unfortunately, very brief and doesn't talk about this distinction but not all conceptions result in births. Embryos are often reabsorbed without the mother even being aware. I would expect the number of mutations at birth to be lower than the number at conception because those with more and more serious mutations are never born.
Since Facebook will give an account to anybody, there is no privacy difference for the user between "everybody with a Facebook account" and "everyone with or without a Facebook account" However, for Facebook itself there is a difference. If they allow Google to spider and publish "public" data then Facebook loses their exclusive right to profit from user supplied data. Facebook has an economic interest in making as much data as possible public but not accessible to Google.
I have personally known many people who smoke because they *think* it helps suppress appetite. In fact they often justify the cost by claiming they save on food. I've always assumed this is one of the many reasons young females choose to smoke.
I haven't heard the part about saving money on food. That's a bit bizarre. It's not unreasonable to think that smoking helps people to lose weight though. Nicotine is a known appetite suppressant and it is also a stimulant. So eat less and burn more.
I have heard from those that tried to quit, gained weight, and used that as an excuse to resume smoking.
If it is found that that most of the weight loss is from the additives and not from the nicotine, then it might convince some of the vanity smokers to give it up. Why smoke if you can get same weight control effect from an over the counter pill that doesn't leave tar if your lungs?
When I was younger (and nerdier) I once proposed a similar but more sensible version using in-universe technology that was well understood by Starwars fans: force fields. Obviously, starships have shields that keep asteroids, debris, weapons and projectiles from damaging them. Similarly, speeders and various devices apply forces at a distance to hover and float. Why can't this technology be used to harness a plasma field as a cutting device?
Because force fields are just as improbable as light sabers and for a lot of the same reasons. Force fields are more widely employed in sci-fi but that doesn't make them any closer to the reality we actually live in.
And don't give me the "radio interference" crap - there's no evidence at all to support this and it's routinely ignored by anybody in the industry.
How many times do you have to be told that the point is to make sure you pay attention to what is happening around you since take off and landing is when the plane and you are most vulnerable.
Actually, pretty much nobody is saying that except you and for good reason: It doesn't make any sense. The instructions are specifically to "put away all electronic devices", not "put away all distractions". They don't mention and don't seem to care about books, mechanical toys, etc. While rubik's cubes are rather uncommon distractions, books are not and yet passengers are never instructed to put away reading materials. This despite the fact that a good book can be every bit as distracting as a laptop computer.
I would hope these devices have a good warranty. Flash has limited write endurance and writes are slow too. Cache operation is all about concentrated writes and rewrites. Cache is just about the worst application possible for flash.
I don't think I'll ever understand why people consider noisiness in a keyboard to be a feature. I consider it to be a bug. It's distracting when people around you are trying to concentrate. It's annoying and inconsiderate. I shouldn't have to wear earplugs around you just to get my work done.
I'll gladly turn in my geek card if it means I can get some peace and quiet while I work. Have fun with your nostalgia on your own time; please don't force me to partake of it, too.
Click keyboards were the result of manufacturers exploiting a misunderstanding of their customers. Mechanical keyboards with good travel tended to be noisy relative to spongy membrane keyboards. Discerning but confused customers would seek out keyboards with a noticeable click. Manufacturers responded by making keyboards that clicked louder than necessary. Often the feel wasn't even very good. They keyboard was just noisy.
A good mechanical keyboard isn't necessarily loud at all. My all time favorite was the Apple IIe keyboard. Light, smooth travel, and virtually noiseless. The travel was also shorter distance than the IBM keyboards which made typing quicker but it still had that effortless movement down to solid bottom that typifies the best mechanical keyboards.
> File revisions
Dropbox, subversion, time machine, snapshots - it is just that we have more solutions now than back in the days, and you have to pick one.
Not the same thing. Version control systems are manual. They only kick in when you deliberately access the version control system.
File versions are automatic. You get a new version every time you save a file, not the next time you commit, not at the next backup but now. And it applies system wide, not just to those key structures that have in a version control repository.
There are some down sides:
Directories get a bit noisy with all the revisions around. It also eats disk space, although that isn't nearly the issue that it used to be.
You want universities to not accept CS students because they didn't take a programming course in high school?
Well id be fucked because my high school didn't offer any programming besides "Web Programming".
So if a student comes from a school that cant afford a real programming course then they just aren't good enough for you? Fuck you. Prick.
Other programs, like Electrical Engineering, start at a level that not everyone is ready for. If you aren't ready for calculus, then you will have to take remedial classes to bring you up to speed on algebra, geometry, and trigonometry. The majority of students, who *are* ready, don't need to waste time being taught what they already know.
I don't see why a Computer Science program could not start assuming that students already know the basics of operating computers and have rudimentary experience writing programs. Those who are not ready can take remedial classes outside the degree program or even outside the school. Why should the students who are ready have their time wasted?
This move is designed to 'force heavy data users to find a better phone vendor'
Nah. That's being taken care of. T-Mobile is being borged into AT&T. Sprint will be soon be extinguished or merged out of existence.
Verizon and AT&T will join together in the monetization of data users. The unlimited plans were just a temporary measure to get their users hooked. Now the surviving duopoly will apply frighteningly expensive overuse fees to encourage their addicts to pay out big bucks for large plans. It worked so well for voice. Did you expect anything else?
but since when has memory footprint been a "benchmark?" Really, we're talking roughly half a gig here, and who's running these on a system without at least 2?
Most netbooks are 1GB. half a gig is a lot just to run the desktop on a machine like that.
Whenever work was slow, we'd fire up Doom on the Sparc Station 10's and 20's. It was one of the very few games available for Sun machines. Whenever I got my own SS10 at home, I did fire up Doom a time or two but never really got into it. I'm not much of a gamer. I think Quake was available for Sun when it came out, too but I never ran it.
The individual nantennas can absorb close to 90 percent of the available in-band energy.
Which is good for communications, where you want to exclude all but the target band. It could even work for power, providing the light source is a laser. But resonance methods aren't very good for capturing energy from broad spectrum sources like the sun.
I predict that this technique will never gain traction for solar energy. However, it might replace photodiodes for fiber optic communications.
The Solar Challenger did a 262km international flight from England to France in 1981. Given that the Solar Impulse has a max speed of 50km/h (from TFA) and was in the air almost 13 hours, that suggests a flight in the neighborhood of 600km. Not bad but then, one would expect some progress after 30 years.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_Challenger
Given the same lens projecting the same image circle, a larger sensor that is still within the image circle will have more light hitting it than a smaller sensor.
True. But that sensor will capture a different image, making the comparison meaningless. Once you crop the image down so it is the same as the small sensor's image the advantage disappears.
And "Pay for reliability, not mileage. On a car, you'll spend more of repairs and maintaince over its lifetime than you will on a difference in gas." needs to re-think that when faced with $6-$8 a gallon gas prices. At $6 a gallon, 20mpg is going to cost you $30,000.00 in gas over 100,000 miles. At 40mpg you save $15,000.00
Think of how many people bought their cars when gas prices were half what they were today. When buying a car today, you have to keep in mind that history tends to repeat itself.
Indeed. I think most people estimate fuel cost based on current prices. That's shows ignorance of economics and history. Unless you are planning to keep your car for only a very short time, you can bank on gas prices being substantially higher when you sell the vehicle than they are today. When I bought my civic early in 2006, I estimate average fuel prices over the 10 year span I expected to own the vehicle at $5/gallon. Current prices were about $2.50/gallon. I am now thinking my estimate was a bit low but not so far off that the hybrid would have been a better deal. I just don't drive that much.
Taking risks can mean bigger success or bigger failure. Focusing on the stand out successes doesn't tell the whole story. Winning big always requires taking big risks. But that doesn't mean that everyone would benefit from such behavior. There is a reason why conformity is in our genes. On average, it a better strategy. You might not become the tribal leader but, with help of your buddies, you are less likely to be eaten by a bear. In this age, you might not make CEO, but you are less likely to be laid off and more likely to get help finding a new job if you are.
From TFA:
The proposed “Transportation Opportunities Act” would mandate a vehicle miles traveled (VMT) tax that’s calculated by installing electronic equipment on each car and at filling stations. VMT calculation and payment would take place electronically every time you buy gas at the pump.
It won't be soon but, at some point, enough cars will be electric that we will need an alternative to the fuel tax. But electric cars don't go to filling stations which makes a mileage tax based on visits to filling stations kind of pointless. It's a lot more complex than the fuel tax and it is even less accurate. Fuel taxes account for the fact that larger vehicles, which cause more damage to the roads per mile, also burn more fuel per mile.
As others have said, it is a lot simpler to just raise the fuel tax. Actually, I don't understand why the fuel tax is a fixed value anyway. If it were a % of the purchase price like ordinary sales taxes, then revenue should stay fairly level as prices rise and usage drops.
But it doesn't scale.
Ideas and problems get tossed around that don't necessarily get aired or aired to the same people in formal meetings. In my last company, some of the most important ideas came out of the lunchtime banter. Unfortunately, as the company grew, it became more compartmentalized. People's schedules became more constrained by other people in their respective groups. It was harder to get a lunch crew together. People in the same group would often lunch together but without the exchange of ideas across groups it wasn't as useful.
Because, even folded, it is too big for a pocket and the only compartment that it will fit in that won't also hold a non-folding tablet is a purse.
How does this advance the Republican goal of balancing the budget?
Funny thing: Changing NASA's direction is actually pretty cheap. There is a lot of paperwork and studies to do but that's a lot cheaper than building the hardware committed to in the last change of direction. Now there is still the issue of building the newly requested hardware but that won't happen until long after the next election.
Who employs most people in the world? Greedy people. Who makes most of the goods and services in the world? Greedy people.
Recent evidence suggests that the effective harnessing of greed and greedy people for the greater good is breaking down. In a well run capitalistic system, greedy people give jobs and wealth to many as they pursue personal wealth. Unfortunately, greedy people have found they can more easily create personal wealth if they sharply reduce the jobs and wealth they spread around (offshoring). Others have figured out how to generate great personal wealth without creating anything of value at all. (high frequency trading, housing bubble)
Left to their own devices, devious greedy people will simply recreate feudalism: hoarding the wealth for themselves and leaving the peasants to starve.
While I agree that a hologram projection would be kinda cool (though a street chase won't seem right in my living room), stereoscopic vision is what makes our brains think in 3D, if you will. Stereoscopic images are simply trying to provide exactly what your brain interprets as 3D.
Not quote. Stereoscopic vision is part of what makes our brains think in 3D. We also sense 3D by adjusting focus. This doesn't work with the simple stereoscopic 3D. Parallax tells our brain that the image is 3D. Focus says that it is flat. That conflict creates eye strain, headaches, etc and it isn't going away with any technology currently offered to consumers.
it means the time from unemployed without notice to having a job was a day.
Yeah, so? You didn't like the terms. Big deal. You still had a paycheck and you didn't have to explain away the unsightly gap on your resume. You also didn't have to worry about your resume being filtered out for the gap without you getting a chance to explain it.
My last full time job, along with the entire company, disappeared in 48 hours. No severance No warning. No chance to get my resume circulating before the axe came.