Once the two are combined, they plan to split into three separate companies, consisting of agricultural chemicals, specialty products and materials, like plastics. Despite the eventual breakup, the deal would undergo rigorous antitrust scrutiny for all three companies, particularly the agricultural chemicals company. Still, the companies did not expect that the deal would require much in the way of other divestitures to satisfy regulators’ concerns.
So, they plan to combine two competing companies into one and then divide into three non-competing companies and they expect this to satisfy regulators? Are the regulators that corrupt?
That salary might be low in some places and high in others. It might be low in one industry or high in another.
This.
H1-B jobs are supposed to be paid at the prevailing wage for the position and the industry it's in. We can be cynical about how some employers scoff at this and misuse H1-Bs, but the solution is to enforce the existing law, not break it with an unworkable across-the-board salary threshold.
You need both: a requirement to pay at least the prevailing wage and a requirement to pay at least a fixed wage.
Prevailing wage should generally be best but, without a hard number, it is too easy to game. That is what the fixed minimum would come in. No matter how you classify a position to try to work around the prevailing wage requirement, you can't pay less than the fixed minimum.
Launching to Earth orbit has a clear business plan. Companies with real revenue streams will pay for this service for sound business reasons. Thus, it makes sense for a private company to do this. They can make money this way and that is what all business are out to do.
Going to Mars, though, does not have a clear plan. Where is the profit? Even if you can do it for a reasonable cost, how do you make money? Thus, I'm sure many in NASA and outside, are doubtful that Musk will actually do this.
However, if Elon Musk does send humans to Mars then funding NASA to do the same thing is an expensive redundancy. If enough of Congress believes that story then there will be no funding for NASA.
If Elon Musk does not go to Mars and NASA does not go to Mars (because congress thought Elon Musk would do it) then I guess nobody goes to Mars.
That is the sort wariness I would expect from smart people working at NASA.
Russia is not a reliable supplier. Shipping gas across the Atlantic is costly or at least undeveloped. Fracking has not taken root in Europe So, where is all that natural gas priced to be cost effect for power generation going to come from?
To be fair to the space shuttle, it went a really high number of miles between services!
Yes, but for the vast majority of those miles, the main engines are off. The engines only fire during launch. The airframe is stressed during launch and decent. All those miles racked up in the middle orbiting the Earth? They don't count much. A little bit of thrusting from the OMS. Maybe a scratch of micrometeors against the shell. Might as well be sitting in a hanger.
Apparently, some articles now "clearly" show the story link in light green font on the dark green of the article header now (in parenthesis no less so we know it is a detail rather than the main point).
It is actually worst than that. The text is merely the host name of the site where the article comes from. There is nothing to suggest a link pointing to the article rather than the main page or an advertisement for the New York Times. So, it is really just a button whose behavior is only learned by trial and error and which may very well change in the future. That is what a lack of context gives you: no guaranty or even suggestion that future behavior will be consistent with current response.
The web, and especially this site, is based on contextual hyperlinks. Replacing them with something new that is meant to be an improvement would probably be a bad idea. Replacing contextual hyperlinks with hip minimalist design that doesn't even attempt to replicate their utility is beyond stupid. I am baffled that such a change could actually make it to the production side of a web site used by more than two people.
Underground testing was never an environmental problem. Ending all testing has always been about ending the nuclear arms race.
If technology allows the existing arsenal to be tested without detonating anything then it is only a small step further for new designs to be be verified without physical testing. Then we are back on the nuclear treadmill only this time, advancement can be hidden since there are no testing that friends or foes can detect.
Move? Fallout does not rain down immediately. It takes quite some time for particulate matter raised by a nuclear explosion to come back back to ground. All an observer needs to do to avoid fallout is not hang around long after watching the detonation. Also, an aerial detonation produces negligible fallout anyway.
That does not mean it is safe, though. If you can see the explosion than the primary X-rays and gamma rays can "see" you. I don't think there is any safe way to directly observe a nuclear explosion.
According to the article NASA knew exactly where it was, that it was not destroyed and had even come to inspect it.
"NASA knew it was still available. In my mind, they tried to play a trickery game. They wanted me to loan it to them, but I think they just wanted to get it into their possession. They offered me [perks], they offered me everything but cash," the junkyard owner said. "NASA told me when they came out to inspect it that they had looked for it for 25 years. It is the von Braun, the first and last they made. I was told it is the rarest of all the units."
So what's the deal?
I imagine it went something like this:
NASA Rep: That's GREAT! You've done your country a great service by preserving this priceless artifact. When shall we pick it up? Junk Yard Owner: Now hold on a minute! This ain't free. I want to be paid. NASA Rep: OK. How much do you want? Junk Yard Owner: $BIGNUM NASA Rep: This is a side project. We don't have that kind of budget. Junk Yard Owner: This is a limited time offer! If you don't pay $BIGNUM by X, I will melt it down! Then what will your superiors say? NASA Rep: My superiors barely approve of me spending time on this. I think it is important but there is no way I can get the money you ask. Junk Yard Owner: I'm serious! I'll melt it down! NASA Rep: Well, then I guess we're done here.
[Time X + Delta] NASA PR: A priceless artifact of the Apollo program has been melted down.
[Time X + Delta + Y] Junk Yard Owner: I did not melt it down. NASA just has to pay me.
How about getting us off this rock before we're wiped out by an asteroid?
Apart from the area directly under the splat, Earth immediately after a dino-killer asteroid strike will still be more habitable by a large margin than anywhere else in the solar system.
Or getting us off this rock before our population expands to the point where it can no longer sustain us?
This argument has more merit. The biggest threat to humans is almost certainly other humans and one sure fire way to get humans to behave badly is to cut off their resources so they end up fighting each other over what remains.
The trouble is: Earth has an awful lot of easy accessible resources. Flowing water works to separate minerals into rich veins that just don't exist elsewhere. It is hard to find resources that are available in space that can be compete with even the "difficult" and "unprofitable" sources on Earth especially when you factor in the enormous transportation costs.
Solar power and Helium 3 are about the only resources that stand a good chance and we don't actually have the tech to make use of Helium 3.
As a practicing electrical engineer, I know just six names*:
Thomas Edison Alexander Graham Bell Nikola Tesla Steve Wozniak Jay Miner John Mashey
I don't mean to belittle Forrest Mimms or his contribution. It just never seemed important to know who did things if they were not people I was ever going to interact with.
*Yes, I'm sure I could expand this if I spent time trying to come up with names and researching who wrote certain books but this is the full list that immediately comes to mind where I know just as immediately what they all did.
Moto E is a low end phone. Maybe it doesn't not satisfy the Marshmallow hardware requirements?
Plausible. The Moto E has only 1GB of RAM. However, Moto X 2013 is also missing from the Marshmallow list. It has 2GB just like the 2014 model, which is on the list.
More people walk to work in SF than anywhere I've ever been. I wander what the accident rates are per mile walked?
What? You want details and careful analysis? All they said was "among the most dangerous" and a one-off statistic to lead in their story about a pedestrian safety advertizing campaign. Neither the summer or the article specify what other cities was compared. As far we know Barcelona could be exceptionally safe and San Francisco could be the safest (by some metric) city in North America.
This was never about Microsoft suing Google or Google suing Microsoft. It was about Microsoft suing Android phone manufactures for patent violations. Google themselves only became involved as a way to get Microsoft to back out. Essentially: "If you sue my customers I will sue you for violating Motorola patents".
It looks like Google lost since TFA mentions nothing about Microsoft promising not to sue Android OEM's.
IBM is the worlds greatest patent troll . Oracle and the jolly fellas are not even close.
IBM arguably has the world's largest arsenal of dubious patents. However, they don't seem to use them for anything but defense. If they've done any trolling at all, it has been on a small enough scale that few noticed.
Chances are they aren't producing much of their electricity domestically any more and instead are importing.
They didn't shut down their nuclear reactors and a whole bunch of coal plants just sprung up everywhere to take up the slack.
Um. This is Japan, and Island country. I'm pretty sure they are not importing electricity from anywhere, though they do have some submarine cables between the islands. If they did build a cable on the shortest route to South Korea (the only plausible endpoint) it would be on the longest undersea power cables in the world. Maybe if/when the build the tunnel
"The good news is that autonomous cars don't need to park-- they just go give someone else a ride. They could change city life forever."
This will not change with autonomous cars. If people didn't want to own cars, the above situation could exist _now_ -- they are or were called taxis/taxi cabs/cabs/hansom cabs/licensed hackney carriages.
Yes and no. In principle people could do that and certain very high density areas, they already do. However, outside these areas, relying on taxis is too expensive and inconvenient. Further, the cost of car ownership is lower since parking one is neither difficult nor expensive.
Autonomous vehicles will greatly reduce the cost of taxis. The cost reduction means there will be more of them so they will be more convenient too. I expect many more people will choose to go car-less in that environment.
I don't expect all them will give up their cars, though. I'm not even sure that most of them will.
Self-driving cars do actually have to park.
Private self-driving cars will need to go somewhere to wait. It won't need to be all that close but they will need to go there. This may actually increase traffic on freeways and arterials as self driving cars head home after dropping off their owners, only to return again sometime later to pick them up. One round trip turns into two.
Self driving taxi will not be able to stay usefully in service all the time. They will need to park somewhere or circle uselessly, which is arguably worse.
What they should have meant: the raw bit error rate was high and there were many retransmits. What they probably meant:: The square waves weren't very square.
Auto ownership has probably hit it's peak, self-driving cars will make the expense of individual ownership less and less appealing in general. And owning an ICE for road trips is ridiculous. Just rent the car.
When did we reach the conclusion that self driving cars is some sort of given fact?
I think it is pretty straight forward that private ownership will decrease though it is not often presented well.
1) Self drive will make taxi's much cheaper by removing the cost of paying the driver. 2) Convenience will increase too, partly through better allocating the available vehicles. This is made easier with self drive since it does not have to link up with an available driver but it is also through better information technology predicting where cars need to be. 3) With cheaper and more convenient taxi's more people will use them. Those that can only marginally justify owning a car will give up their cars. The increased use will also make taxi's more convenient creating a bit of a feedback cycle.
However, I am not convinced that, outside of dense urban areas, the ratio of people who can practically give up their cars even with cheap taxis is high enough to produce the "almost no-one owns a car" utopia. I think most suburban dwellers will still own cars. They just won't drive them. The last driven as much by the cost of insuring a manual drive car as the convenience of autonomous drive.
Crops already are invasive species. The majority of them were originally native to the Middle East and we have modified them through manual selection to grow in other regions just as successfully. We count on them to outcompete native plants (if corn (which was actually from Central America I believe) can't outproduce native prairie grasses in Iowa and Nebraska then we won't have any corn).
. The point at which it could become a bad thing has already past
Crops are not invasive species. They are non-native species but that is not the same thing. An invasive species has a survival advantage over native species. Typically, this is an adaption to a threat not present outside its native environment. Crops are not like that. They are modified to produce more/better food for us. That puts them at a disadvantage against native plants (aka "weeds"). They need help to survive. That is exactly the opposite of invasive.
Direct genetic modification makes it easier to improve all crop characteristics but the basic trade-offs remain. It would certainly be possible to engineer a super tomato or super corn that would out-compete native plants and take over the landscape. It wouldn't be of any use to anyone though since the only one to get there is to make the plant nearly useless for food production.
It would appear prudent to uninstall Google Hangouts.
Prudent but not always possible. On some versions of Android, Google Hangouts is a system app part of the os image. It can not be uninstalled. Only updates can be uninstalled, which is not helpful in this case.
This is not the case of my old phone. It runs Gingerbread and Hangouts did not exist when Gingerbread came out. It also not true of my new phone. I'm running a third party "debloated" version of Lollipop that omits Hangouts and other not-necessarily desired apps from the image.
I run a nightly ROM on my phone, but that's only because there's no stable release of it anymore (it's officially "unmaintained" but the nightlies work well).
My laptop runs debian testing, which I update daily. I follow "testing" not "stretch" - so when stretch is released (in 25 years or so), it'll automatically "upgrade" to the next testing.
My desktop runs arch. They use a rolling release, so I update that pretty often as well.
So I guess the whole "how often do you update" thing doesn't apply to rolling OSs.
Sure it does. Just because a release is offered doesn't mean you have to install it. I run gentoo which also does rolling releases. There are pros and cons to keeping up or rather *not* keeping up. The pro is that you don't have to deal with the breakages. The con is that eventually you will need to come up to current and that can be a holy terror. Not only do you have a large number of manual fixes for things that don't settle out on their own but sometimes you can't easily get from the version you have to the version that is current without going through an intermediate version that is not easily determined and may not even be in Portage anymore.
I kind of wish there was an option to update only those packages that have not changed for a week or two. That way, if packages fixes are needed, someone else finds them and the packages is fixed before I have to deal with it.
I'm in the middle of updating an eepc 900 to useably current ubuntu. While not strictly a rolling release, the machine is nearly six years behind so I have to install LTS updates sequentially. No obvious breakages so far but it does take a very long time.
Intel is stalling at 14nm. Everyone else stalled at 28nm. 28nm is still the cheapest node in per transistor terms. Since most chip makers are driven by cost rather than transistor performance, there have been few takers for 20nm and 14nm.
The GMO label means nothing, but those pushing it will use it to imply GMO=unsafe. It then becomes a weapon they can use to advance their agenda to have all GMO removed from the food chain. For no good reason.
Some people falsely believe gluten is bad. Do you support banning labels that tell people that a food contains wheat?
Non-sequitur. Celiac is quite real even if most of the people avoiding gluten don't have it. There is no such thing as "GMO sensitivity". Indeed, there can't be because "GMO" is not a substance.
Slashdot Mirror
Once the two are combined, they plan to split into three separate companies, consisting of agricultural chemicals, specialty products and materials, like plastics.
Despite the eventual breakup, the deal would undergo rigorous antitrust scrutiny for all three companies, particularly the agricultural chemicals company. Still, the companies did not expect that the deal would require much in the way of other divestitures to satisfy regulators’ concerns.
So, they plan to combine two competing companies into one and then divide into three non-competing companies and they expect this to satisfy regulators? Are the regulators that corrupt?
That salary might be low in some places and high in others. It might be low in one industry or high in another.
This.
H1-B jobs are supposed to be paid at the prevailing wage for the position and the industry it's in. We can be cynical about how some employers scoff at this and misuse H1-Bs, but the solution is to enforce the existing law, not break it with an unworkable across-the-board salary threshold.
You need both: a requirement to pay at least the prevailing wage and a requirement to pay at least a fixed wage.
Prevailing wage should generally be best but, without a hard number, it is too easy to game. That is what the fixed minimum would come in. No matter how you classify a position to try to work around the prevailing wage requirement, you can't pay less than the fixed minimum.
Launching to Earth orbit has a clear business plan. Companies with real revenue streams will pay for this service for sound business reasons. Thus, it makes sense for a private company to do this. They can make money this way and that is what all business are out to do.
Going to Mars, though, does not have a clear plan. Where is the profit? Even if you can do it for a reasonable cost, how do you make money? Thus, I'm sure many in NASA and outside, are doubtful that Musk will actually do this.
However, if Elon Musk does send humans to Mars then funding NASA to do the same thing is an expensive redundancy. If enough of Congress believes that story then there will be no funding for NASA.
If Elon Musk does not go to Mars and NASA does not go to Mars (because congress thought Elon Musk would do it) then I guess nobody goes to Mars.
That is the sort wariness I would expect from smart people working at NASA.
Russia is not a reliable supplier. Shipping gas across the Atlantic is costly or at least undeveloped. Fracking has not taken root in Europe So, where is all that natural gas priced to be cost effect for power generation going to come from?
To be fair to the space shuttle, it went a really high number of miles between services!
Yes, but for the vast majority of those miles, the main engines are off. The engines only fire during launch. The airframe is stressed during launch and decent. All those miles racked up in the middle orbiting the Earth? They don't count much. A little bit of thrusting from the OMS. Maybe a scratch of micrometeors against the shell. Might as well be sitting in a hanger.
Apparently, some articles now "clearly" show the story link in light green font on the dark green of the article header now (in parenthesis no less so we know it is a detail rather than the main point).
It is actually worst than that. The text is merely the host name of the site where the article comes from. There is nothing to suggest a link pointing to the article rather than the main page or an advertisement for the New York Times. So, it is really just a button whose behavior is only learned by trial and error and which may very well change in the future. That is what a lack of context gives you: no guaranty or even suggestion that future behavior will be consistent with current response.
The web, and especially this site, is based on contextual hyperlinks. Replacing them with something new that is meant to be an improvement would probably be a bad idea. Replacing contextual hyperlinks with hip minimalist design that doesn't even attempt to replicate their utility is beyond stupid. I am baffled that such a change could actually make it to the production side of a web site used by more than two people.
Underground testing was never an environmental problem. Ending all testing has always been about ending the nuclear arms race.
If technology allows the existing arsenal to be tested without detonating anything then it is only a small step further for new designs to be be verified without physical testing. Then we are back on the nuclear treadmill only this time, advancement can be hidden since there are no testing that friends or foes can detect.
Atmospheric tests were banned by treaty in the '60s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
And how do you plan on dealing with fallout?
Move? Fallout does not rain down immediately. It takes quite some time for particulate matter raised by a nuclear explosion to come back back to ground. All an observer needs to do to avoid fallout is not hang around long after watching the detonation. Also, an aerial detonation produces negligible fallout anyway.
That does not mean it is safe, though. If you can see the explosion than the primary X-rays and gamma rays can "see" you. I don't think there is any safe way to directly observe a nuclear explosion.
According to the article NASA knew exactly where it was, that it was not destroyed and had even come to inspect it.
"NASA knew it was still available. In my mind, they tried to play a trickery game. They wanted me to loan it to them, but I think they just wanted to get it into their possession. They offered me [perks], they offered me everything but cash," the junkyard owner said. "NASA told me when they came out to inspect it that they had looked for it for 25 years. It is the von Braun, the first and last they made. I was told it is the rarest of all the units."
So what's the deal?
I imagine it went something like this:
NASA Rep: That's GREAT! You've done your country a great service by preserving this priceless artifact. When shall we pick it up?
Junk Yard Owner: Now hold on a minute! This ain't free. I want to be paid.
NASA Rep: OK. How much do you want?
Junk Yard Owner: $BIGNUM
NASA Rep: This is a side project. We don't have that kind of budget.
Junk Yard Owner: This is a limited time offer! If you don't pay $BIGNUM by X, I will melt it down! Then what will your superiors say?
NASA Rep: My superiors barely approve of me spending time on this. I think it is important but there is no way I can get the money you ask.
Junk Yard Owner: I'm serious! I'll melt it down!
NASA Rep: Well, then I guess we're done here.
[Time X + Delta]
NASA PR: A priceless artifact of the Apollo program has been melted down.
[Time X + Delta + Y]
Junk Yard Owner: I did not melt it down. NASA just has to pay me.
How about getting us off this rock before we're wiped out by an asteroid?
Apart from the area directly under the splat, Earth immediately after a dino-killer asteroid strike will still be more habitable by a large margin than anywhere else in the solar system.
Or getting us off this rock before our population expands to the point where it can no longer sustain us?
This argument has more merit. The biggest threat to humans is almost certainly other humans and one sure fire way to get humans to behave badly is to cut off their resources so they end up fighting each other over what remains.
The trouble is: Earth has an awful lot of easy accessible resources. Flowing water works to separate minerals into rich veins that just don't exist elsewhere. It is hard to find resources that are available in space that can be compete with even the "difficult" and "unprofitable" sources on Earth especially when you factor in the enormous transportation costs.
Solar power and Helium 3 are about the only resources that stand a good chance and we don't actually have the tech to make use of Helium 3.
As a practicing electrical engineer, I know just six names*:
Thomas Edison
Alexander Graham Bell
Nikola Tesla
Steve Wozniak
Jay Miner
John Mashey
I don't mean to belittle Forrest Mimms or his contribution. It just never seemed important to know who did things if they were not people I was ever going to interact with.
*Yes, I'm sure I could expand this if I spent time trying to come up with names and researching who wrote certain books but this is the full list that immediately comes to mind where I know just as immediately what they all did.
Moto E is a low end phone. Maybe it doesn't not satisfy the Marshmallow hardware requirements?
Plausible. The Moto E has only 1GB of RAM. However, Moto X 2013 is also missing from the Marshmallow list. It has 2GB just like the 2014 model, which is on the list.
More people walk to work in SF than anywhere I've ever been. I wander what the accident rates are per mile walked?
What? You want details and careful analysis? All they said was "among the most dangerous" and a one-off statistic to lead in their story about a pedestrian safety advertizing campaign. Neither the summer or the article specify what other cities was compared. As far we know Barcelona could be exceptionally safe and San Francisco could be the safest (by some metric) city in North America.
This was never about Microsoft suing Google or Google suing Microsoft. It was about Microsoft suing Android phone manufactures for patent violations. Google themselves only became involved as a way to get Microsoft to back out. Essentially: "If you sue my customers I will sue you for violating Motorola patents".
It looks like Google lost since TFA mentions nothing about Microsoft promising not to sue Android OEM's.
IBM is the worlds greatest patent troll . Oracle and the jolly fellas are not even close.
IBM arguably has the world's largest arsenal of dubious patents. However, they don't seem to use them for anything but defense. If they've done any trolling at all, it has been on a small enough scale that few noticed.
Chances are they aren't producing much of their electricity domestically any more and instead are importing.
They didn't shut down their nuclear reactors and a whole bunch of coal plants just sprung up everywhere to take up the slack.
Um. This is Japan, and Island country. I'm pretty sure they are not importing electricity from anywhere, though they do have some submarine cables between the islands. If they did build a cable on the shortest route to South Korea (the only plausible endpoint) it would be on the longest undersea power cables in the world. Maybe if/when the build the tunnel
Promises, promises, promises...
Not even specific promises.
I would bet it is only for the first year after a model is released and even then, only if the carrier cooperates.
"The good news is that autonomous cars don't need to park-- they just go give someone else a ride. They could change city life forever."
This will not change with autonomous cars. If people didn't want to own cars, the above situation could exist _now_ -- they are or were called taxis/taxi cabs/cabs/hansom cabs/licensed hackney carriages.
Yes and no. In principle people could do that and certain very high density areas, they already do. However, outside these areas, relying on taxis is too expensive and inconvenient. Further, the cost of car ownership is lower since parking one is neither difficult nor expensive.
Autonomous vehicles will greatly reduce the cost of taxis. The cost reduction means there will be more of them so they will be more convenient too. I expect many more people will choose to go car-less in that environment.
I don't expect all them will give up their cars, though. I'm not even sure that most of them will.
Self-driving cars do actually have to park.
Private self-driving cars will need to go somewhere to wait. It won't need to be all that close but they will need to go there. This may actually increase traffic on freeways and arterials as self driving cars head home after dropping off their owners, only to return again sometime later to pick them up. One round trip turns into two.
Self driving taxi will not be able to stay usefully in service all the time. They will need to park somewhere or circle uselessly, which is arguably worse.
What is this data passing noise?
What they should have meant: the raw bit error rate was high and there were many retransmits.
What they probably meant:: The square waves weren't very square.
Auto ownership has probably hit it's peak, self-driving cars will make the expense of individual ownership less and less appealing in general. And owning an ICE for road trips is ridiculous. Just rent the car.
When did we reach the conclusion that self driving cars is some sort of given fact?
I think it is pretty straight forward that private ownership will decrease though it is not often presented well.
1) Self drive will make taxi's much cheaper by removing the cost of paying the driver.
2) Convenience will increase too, partly through better allocating the available vehicles. This is made easier with self drive since it does not have to link up with an available driver but it is also through better information technology predicting where cars need to be.
3) With cheaper and more convenient taxi's more people will use them. Those that can only marginally justify owning a car will give up their cars. The increased use will also make taxi's more convenient creating a bit of a feedback cycle.
However, I am not convinced that, outside of dense urban areas, the ratio of people who can practically give up their cars even with cheap taxis is high enough to produce the "almost no-one owns a car" utopia. I think most suburban dwellers will still own cars. They just won't drive them. The last driven as much by the cost of insuring a manual drive car as the convenience of autonomous drive.
Crops already are invasive species. The majority of them were originally native to the Middle East and we have modified them through manual selection to grow in other regions just as successfully. We count on them to outcompete native plants (if corn (which was actually from Central America I believe) can't outproduce native prairie grasses in Iowa and Nebraska then we won't have any corn).
.
The point at which it could become a bad thing has already past
Crops are not invasive species. They are non-native species but that is not the same thing. An invasive species has a survival advantage over native species. Typically, this is an adaption to a threat not present outside its native environment. Crops are not like that. They are modified to produce more/better food for us. That puts them at a disadvantage against native plants (aka "weeds"). They need help to survive. That is exactly the opposite of invasive.
Direct genetic modification makes it easier to improve all crop characteristics but the basic trade-offs remain. It would certainly be possible to engineer a super tomato or super corn that would out-compete native plants and take over the landscape. It wouldn't be of any use to anyone though since the only one to get there is to make the plant nearly useless for food production.
It would appear prudent to uninstall Google Hangouts.
Prudent but not always possible. On some versions of Android, Google Hangouts is a system app part of the os image. It can not be uninstalled. Only updates can be uninstalled, which is not helpful in this case.
This is not the case of my old phone. It runs Gingerbread and Hangouts did not exist when Gingerbread came out. It also not true of my new phone. I'm running a third party "debloated" version of Lollipop that omits Hangouts and other not-necessarily desired apps from the image.
I run a nightly ROM on my phone, but that's only because there's no stable release of it anymore (it's officially "unmaintained" but the nightlies work well).
My laptop runs debian testing, which I update daily. I follow "testing" not "stretch" - so when stretch is released (in 25 years or so), it'll automatically "upgrade" to the next testing.
My desktop runs arch. They use a rolling release, so I update that pretty often as well.
So I guess the whole "how often do you update" thing doesn't apply to rolling OSs.
Sure it does. Just because a release is offered doesn't mean you have to install it. I run gentoo which also does rolling releases. There are pros and cons to keeping up or rather *not* keeping up. The pro is that you don't have to deal with the breakages. The con is that eventually you will need to come up to current and that can be a holy terror. Not only do you have a large number of manual fixes for things that don't settle out on their own but sometimes you can't easily get from the version you have to the version that is current without going through an intermediate version that is not easily determined and may not even be in Portage anymore.
I kind of wish there was an option to update only those packages that have not changed for a week or two. That way, if packages fixes are needed, someone else finds them and the packages is fixed before I have to deal with it.
I'm in the middle of updating an eepc 900 to useably current ubuntu. While not strictly a rolling release, the machine is nearly six years behind so I have to install LTS updates sequentially. No obvious breakages so far but it does take a very long time.
Intel is stalling at 14nm. Everyone else stalled at 28nm. 28nm is still the cheapest node in per transistor terms. Since most chip makers are driven by cost rather than transistor performance, there have been few takers for 20nm and 14nm.
The GMO label means nothing, but those pushing it will use it to imply GMO=unsafe. It then becomes a weapon they can use to advance their agenda to have all GMO removed from the food chain. For no good reason.
Some people falsely believe gluten is bad. Do you support banning labels that tell people that a food contains wheat?
Non-sequitur. Celiac is quite real even if most of the people avoiding gluten don't have it. There is no such thing as "GMO sensitivity". Indeed, there can't be because "GMO" is not a substance.