other opponents of labeling genetically modified foods
Now who the hell considers themselves an opponent of labeling GMO foods unless they have a financial stake in it? Is there anyone walking down the street who has nothing to do with the food industry and considers themselves an opponent of labeling GMO foods?
I have no financial stake it in an I oppose labeling of GMO foods.
This... legislation will ensure that Americans have accurate, consistent information about their food
So a law that requires that GMO foods are labeled as GMO foods would be a barrier to accurate, consistent information?
Yes. Because "GMO" doesn't tell you anything all. It makes people *think* they are making an informed choice about their health when actually they are choosing randomly and because people have limited time and attention span, adding the label means other, actually important factors, get less attention.
Elemental tritium would certainly not be spread over any crash site, not unless it was carefully packaged. Otherwise it would head directly for space.
Half right. Tritium is chemically hydrogen. As a gas, it would not spread over the crash site except for a small bit that might bond to solid materials if there is a fire. Most would go into the atmosphere where it would eventually bond with oxygen forming radioactive water. Fun.
Secondary radiation, however, is a different matter. And someone said that the fusion was only a source of neutorns to enhance fission. (That seems like a pretty wierd idea, since we don't currently have fusion working.)
Secondary radiation from the tritium is a non-issue. It is a beta emitter (free electrons) so it can't cause other materials to become radioactive. The neutrons from fusion and the induced fission, on the other hand are quite up to task.
Using fusion as a source of neutrons for fission isn't all that weird. We *do* have fusion working. What we don't have is fusion that produces more energy than it consumes. That is not a problem for a neutron source. It has the advantage over direct fission that bomb making material is never available. If you have a strong enough neutron source, you can fission Uranium 238 directly. No need to breed plutonium, like you would in a breeder reactor.
"We aren't scientists. We haven't done many experiments to prove how much damage the radiation from Wi-Fi can cause."
If you haven't done any experiments to prove how much damage WiFi can cause, then how do you know that your APs are safe?
More precisely: even if you accept that WiFi damages unborn children, how can you be sure that "pregnant women mode" reduces the danger in any meaningful way if you have not done any experiments?
Maybe something's changed in CS. 30 years ago, it was probably more about research into computers. Now, almost everybody who is going into CS has no interest at all in doing computer research. They are mostly interested in doing software development. The entire field has changed focused. More than likely, if you take CS, you'll end up writing code for some thankless corporation who doesn't understand what code is and just wants to churn out stuff as fast as possible. 30 years ago, you'd be much more likely to end up working for NASA, Xerox PARC, IBM, or some other research focused company.
I think you are off by a decade at least. 1985 was just one year before I started college. The atmosphere was much like today but perhaps a bit more optimism. Small computers still fairly new and spreading rapidly. The field was hot. Research organizations were already on the wane. Business data processing ruled. Some things that were different:
1) The volatility of the the computer business was not yet clear. The first major white collar recession was 5 years in the future. The dot.bomb was 15 years out. CS seemed like a much safer choice than it does today.
2) Home computers were far from ubiquitous. Many people started college never having used one. Students taking computer classes mostly did their assignments in the lab, not on their own hardware. So it may have been more social than today.
I'm a little surprised by the 37% number though. It seemed much lower in 1986-1990. At least in computer/electrical engineering. Maybe CS had a better ratio but it has been too long to remember if the CS classes I took were different in the regard.
Lots of "medicine", especially at places like Whole Foods has this warning:
"*This statement has not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration" This product is intended to diagnoise, test, cure or prevent any disease"
At most that would happen is that homeopathy products would get a label similar to this. Doctors would not prescribe homeopathy but do they do that now anyway?
As for why anyone would be a product with this label: because lots of stuff has the label. Some of it is clearly nonsense but others are actually useful, just as not studdied with enough rigor to be labeled as medicine.
The next most abundant element in giant planet atmosphere is helium (four times heavier, per atom, than hydrogen). That means that these warm Neptunes would have proportionately a lot more helium than planets in our solar system, and in fact may have air that’s mostly helium!
But this is not the right math. Mono-atomic hydrogen is nearly a hypothetical construct. Under nearly all circumstances, hydrogen comes bound in pairs. H2: molecular weight of 2. This is still less than helium (atomic weight of 4), which is nearly always mono-atomic but it not a simple thing that helium stays because it is heavier.
Earth has plenty of hydrogen because it binds so readily with heavier elements. Methane (CH4) has molecular weight of 16. Water is 18. 4 is not enough. Earth's primordial helium escaped long ago. All the helium on earth now is due to alpha particles spit out from the radioactive decay of heavier elements.
Venus is thought to have lost its hydrogen due to intense solar radiation breaking apart complex molecules in the upper atmosphere, allowing the freed hydrogen to escape. It is an interesting balancing act to consider a planet where the radiation is strong enough to strip all the hydrogen from a Neptune size planet yet not strong enough to heat it enough for the helium to also escape.
Where is my Thunderbolt high speed LAN network connection? 10G Ethernet is prohibitively expensive, this has 40GB built in. Why can't I use 10G or so of that to network?!
Because three meters (maximum length for Thunderbolt over copper) is kind of short for a network? Apparently you can get optical extenders that will do 30 meters but that doesn't sound like a way to save money.
Altera has many customers who compete with Intel. They are not going to want to deal with Altera anymore. Instead of having Altera as a strong #2, Xilinx is going to own the FPGA business. Good for Xilinx, bad for everyone else.
Given that FPGAs are big, slow, and hot compared to equivalent logic built as a fixed function chip(but with the obvious benefit of not being fixed function), Altera FPGAs manufactured on the fanciest processes available seem like a fairly obvious product of the acquisition..
That was going to happen anyway. Atlera announced that they were going to manufacture on Intel's newest process back in 2013.
Seriously, under what circumstances will you be away from electricity power for more than two days? And that, without considering battery pakcs, a second battery or a portable solar charger...
1) Multi-day backpacking trip. Yes, you could carry extra extra battery, solar charger, etc. But, chances are these are space and weight are at a premium and those items may not make the cut. If one even remembers to bring them along.
2) Traveling to a foreign country where the requisite power adapters have not been acquired or failed to make it into the pack. Bonus for traveling through intermediate countries that have different plugs than your source or destination.
3) Shorter but busy trips where the charging just does not happen. (After a long day, arrive at hotel, go directly to bed. Wake up in the morning. Did I charge my phone? Oops. Oh, well. Gotta run.)
In some of these cases, there is no usable service anyway so you might as well turn the phone off. But I don't always remember to do this and my experience hiking is that it is very easy for me to accidentally turn the phone on and not notice if it still in my pocket.
And, of course, you need to be prepared for battery degradation. Most phones these days do not have replaceable batteries. I always cut the manufacturer's battery life in half when deciding whether it suits my needs.
So let's say the world goes to hell in a handbasket... Civilization burned to the ground. Dog and cats living together, etc.
I hear this a lot from anti-gold people. Yes if the entire world civilization collapses and 98% of humans on earth die, then gold will be worthless. However I would point out that such a scenario has never happened in all of recorded history.
In all of recorded history up until somewhere about the 19th century, there were multiple essentially independent civilizations. It would take a staggering coincidence or a global physical catastrophe (like a dino asteroid) to take them all down at once. In the modern era there is just one civilization. Every place is interconnected with every other and becoming more so. A large enough, fast enough, regional catastrophe could bring everything down if the areas not directly affected can not replace what was lost quickly enough to keep their own machinery from grinding to a halt.
Further, modern technology has given us the means to create global catastrophes. We don't need to wait for the exceedingly rare natural global catastrophe.
Gold is a good hedge against economic chaos causing fiat currencies to lose value. But if the machinery actually stops, it is pretty worthless.
My suggestion is stop believing this crap "Old Grad", you're hardly old, and you're just as able as anyone to pursue this.
I doubt the OP is concerned about being unable. The concern is convincing a prospective employer. 'Been there, done that.
I graduated in 1990. After nearly 7 years of high effort, I finally landed my first engineering job in 1997. What I found is that, even well into the DotCom boom,it was very difficult to get traction. Customers understood experienced engineers. While the demand was less, they knew what to do with fresh grads too. They did not know what to do with or even want to spend the time on an "old grad", someone out of school several years but without relevant work experience. I took numerous extension classes. I carried around prototype board of a project Is working on and eventually go through to two firms at a job fair.
Hardware is harder nut to crack then software, of course but I also had a much more lively economy to work with and I was 7 years out, rather than 12. So, it is not obvious is the OP's task is more or less challenging than mine.
That's not hard to answer. Nobody wants to spend hours on the phone with somebody who:
Can't say anything that isn't on their script.
Has no authority to fix the problem even if they could understand it.
Modern call centres appear to be designed specifically to infuriate people by politely wasting their time without solving any problems.
No. No. No. The purpose of the modern call center is to "solve" customer problems in the most cost efficient manner. If the customer goes away and keeps paying without the company needing to spend resources to fix something, that is a good result. It gets even better if this can be accomplished while paying the customer service rep as little as possible.
It is, of course, a delicate balancing act. Go too cheap and you lose customers. Spend too much and it cuts into the bottom line. The robot training is an attempt to get more successful outcomes (continued customer revenue) without the excessive cost of actually solving problems. Keeping customers "happy" while you screw them is key.
It looks like it just a means of hosting content directly on Facebook. I don't think this means that content will stuffed into the newfeeds of people who didn't ask for it or auto-posted to the walls of those who did. Both would be very bad.
Airliners only need one set of windows at the front, for the pilots. But there's a row of windows on either side, and the seats next to those windows are the second-most-popular (after those on the aisle) despite the fact that they're the most difficult to get in and out of, have no access to the overhead bins, and offer less head/foot room. See also: trains, buses, passenger ferries. So I think the answer is yes: robot cars will still have windows.
The window seats have more room than either the center or aisle seats. The aisle seats do allow extra leg room by using the aisle. However, when the service cart rolls up, the window seat has the advantage.
I'm 6'2" with a 36" inseam. I generally prefer the aisle for the stretch out option but I see the utility of the window seat. The middle seat is painful, of course, as I experienced Sunday on a four hour flight where no other options were available. Mercifully, the passenger in front did not try to recline.
It's hard to take seriously an article claiming New York is the most wasteful megacity when they don't even mention Los Angeles. New York metro is 20 million. Los Angeles metro is 18 million.
How does this work with checked luggage? Presumably your stuff won't be pulled from baggage if you aren't expected to get off in Chicago, but instead in LA.
Obviously, if you only have carry on luggage, that works fine.
It doesn't work with checked luggage. It doesn't work with route trip tickets either. The airlines fixed that a long time ago. If you don't get on the second leg, they cancel your return flight.
What really the trick doesn't work for the kinds of flights most people actually take.
The best part about legislating what kinds of technology people can use is that only legal entities must abide by the law.
So, the "good companies" or "good individuals" who agree with you are now penalized by having back-doors while anyone "bad" is "free" to use solid and effective tools.
Bullet, meet foot.
Actually, this is useful from a law enforcement perspective. Much in the way that Al Capone was convicted of tax evasion rather than racketeering, anybody caught using illegal encryption could be arrested and convicted for that without having to prove that they were doing anything else nefarious.
I would expect the whole surface of the (dwarf) planet to be ice, much like all the other outer system objects too small to be gas giants. It would not necessarily be water ice and TFA did not suggest that it was water. In a region where methane and co2 freeze there are lots of options and water ice would not be favorite for a polar cap.
Actually, the only information so far is: "There is a spot that is brighter than the rest. We don't know why."
Why would anybody want this? I can't think of any mobile apps that would be useful on a regular computer. Most of the really useful mobile apps are only really specific to the fact they're being run on a mobile device, and/or are really only helpful for bridging a gap between a phone and a computer.
While "really useful" is not the word I would use to describe them, Hinge and Tinder are mobile only. Neither has a web site that does more than point to a mobile app.
As I recall, some Craiglist scraping apps had features unavailable on any web site or desktop application.
Waze finally has a useful web interface after years of only being able to check routes on the mobile app.
Slashdot Mirror
other opponents of labeling genetically modified foods
Now who the hell considers themselves an opponent of labeling GMO foods unless they have a financial stake in it? Is there anyone walking down the street who has nothing to do with the food industry and considers themselves an opponent of labeling GMO foods?
I have no financial stake it in an I oppose labeling of GMO foods.
This... legislation will ensure that Americans have accurate, consistent information about their food
So a law that requires that GMO foods are labeled as GMO foods would be a barrier to accurate, consistent information?
Yes. Because "GMO" doesn't tell you anything all. It makes people *think* they are making an informed choice about their health when actually they are choosing randomly and because people have limited time and attention span, adding the label means other, actually important factors, get less attention.
Elemental tritium would certainly not be spread over any crash site, not unless it was carefully packaged. Otherwise it would head directly for space.
Half right. Tritium is chemically hydrogen. As a gas, it would not spread over the crash site except for a small bit that might bond to solid materials if there is a fire. Most would go into the atmosphere where it would eventually bond with oxygen forming radioactive water. Fun.
Secondary radiation, however, is a different matter. And someone said that the fusion was only a source of neutorns to enhance fission. (That seems like a pretty wierd idea, since we don't currently have fusion working.)
Secondary radiation from the tritium is a non-issue. It is a beta emitter (free electrons) so it can't cause other materials to become radioactive. The neutrons from fusion and the induced fission, on the other hand are quite up to task.
Using fusion as a source of neutrons for fission isn't all that weird. We *do* have fusion working. What we don't have is fusion that produces more energy than it consumes. That is not a problem for a neutron source. It has the advantage over direct fission that bomb making material is never available. If you have a strong enough neutron source, you can fission Uranium 238 directly. No need to breed plutonium, like you would in a breeder reactor.
"We aren't scientists. We haven't done many experiments to prove how much damage the radiation from Wi-Fi can cause."
If you haven't done any experiments to prove how much damage WiFi can cause, then how do you know that your APs are safe?
More precisely: even if you accept that WiFi damages unborn children, how can you be sure that "pregnant women mode" reduces the danger in any meaningful way if you have not done any experiments?
Maybe something's changed in CS. 30 years ago, it was probably more about research into computers. Now, almost everybody who is going into CS has no interest at all in doing computer research. They are mostly interested in doing software development. The entire field has changed focused. More than likely, if you take CS, you'll end up writing code for some thankless corporation who doesn't understand what code is and just wants to churn out stuff as fast as possible. 30 years ago, you'd be much more likely to end up working for NASA, Xerox PARC, IBM, or some other research focused company.
I think you are off by a decade at least. 1985 was just one year before I started college. The atmosphere was much like today but perhaps a bit more optimism. Small computers still fairly new and spreading rapidly. The field was hot. Research organizations were already on the wane. Business data processing ruled. Some things that were different:
1) The volatility of the the computer business was not yet clear. The first major white collar recession was 5 years in the future. The dot.bomb was 15 years out. CS seemed like a much safer choice than it does today.
2) Home computers were far from ubiquitous. Many people started college never having used one. Students taking computer classes mostly did their assignments in the lab, not on their own hardware. So it may have been more social than today.
I'm a little surprised by the 37% number though. It seemed much lower in 1986-1990. At least in computer/electrical engineering. Maybe CS had a better ratio but it has been too long to remember if the CS classes I took were different in the regard.
Lots of "medicine", especially at places like Whole Foods has this warning:
"*This statement has not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration"
This product is intended to diagnoise, test, cure or prevent any disease"
At most that would happen is that homeopathy products would get a label similar to this. Doctors would not prescribe homeopathy but do they do that now anyway?
As for why anyone would be a product with this label: because lots of stuff has the label. Some of it is clearly nonsense but others are actually useful, just as not studdied with enough rigor to be labeled as medicine.
From TFA:
The next most abundant element in giant planet atmosphere is helium (four times heavier, per atom, than hydrogen). That means that these warm Neptunes would have proportionately a lot more helium than planets in our solar system, and in fact may have air that’s mostly helium!
But this is not the right math. Mono-atomic hydrogen is nearly a hypothetical construct. Under nearly all circumstances, hydrogen comes bound in pairs. H2: molecular weight of 2. This is still less than helium (atomic weight of 4), which is nearly always mono-atomic but it not a simple thing that helium stays because it is heavier.
Earth has plenty of hydrogen because it binds so readily with heavier elements. Methane (CH4) has molecular weight of 16. Water is 18. 4 is not enough. Earth's primordial helium escaped long ago. All the helium on earth now is due to alpha particles spit out from the radioactive decay of heavier elements.
Venus is thought to have lost its hydrogen due to intense solar radiation breaking apart complex molecules in the upper atmosphere, allowing the freed hydrogen to escape. It is an interesting balancing act to consider a planet where the radiation is strong enough to strip all the hydrogen from a Neptune size planet yet not strong enough to heat it enough for the helium to also escape.
So, is it up to 4 now?
No... They still work for the company and collect paychecks, but it's actually RUN by the board of directors who are elected by the share holders....
Larry and Sergey still own a majority of the voting shares. They own the board, by design.
Where is my Thunderbolt high speed LAN network connection? 10G Ethernet is prohibitively expensive, this has 40GB built in. Why can't I use 10G or so of that to network?!
Because three meters (maximum length for Thunderbolt over copper) is kind of short for a network? Apparently you can get optical extenders that will do 30 meters but that doesn't sound like a way to save money.
Altera has many customers who compete with Intel. They are not going to want to deal with Altera anymore. Instead of having Altera as a strong #2, Xilinx is going to own the FPGA business. Good for Xilinx, bad for everyone else.
Given that FPGAs are big, slow, and hot compared to equivalent logic built as a fixed function chip(but with the obvious benefit of not being fixed function), Altera FPGAs manufactured on the fanciest processes available seem like a fairly obvious product of the acquisition..
That was going to happen anyway. Atlera announced that they were going to manufacture on Intel's newest process back in 2013.
Seriously, under what circumstances will you be away from electricity power for more than two days? And that, without considering battery pakcs, a second battery or a portable solar charger...
1) Multi-day backpacking trip. Yes, you could carry extra extra battery, solar charger, etc. But, chances are these are space and weight are at a premium and those items may not make the cut. If one even remembers to bring them along.
2) Traveling to a foreign country where the requisite power adapters have not been acquired or failed to make it into the pack. Bonus for traveling through intermediate countries that have different plugs than your source or destination.
3) Shorter but busy trips where the charging just does not happen. (After a long day, arrive at hotel, go directly to bed. Wake up in the morning. Did I charge my phone? Oops. Oh, well. Gotta run.)
In some of these cases, there is no usable service anyway so you might as well turn the phone off. But I don't always remember to do this and my experience hiking is that it is very easy for me to accidentally turn the phone on and not notice if it still in my pocket.
And, of course, you need to be prepared for battery degradation. Most phones these days do not have replaceable batteries. I always cut the manufacturer's battery life in half when deciding whether it suits my needs.
So let's say the world goes to hell in a handbasket... Civilization burned to the ground. Dog and cats living together, etc.
I hear this a lot from anti-gold people. Yes if the entire world civilization collapses and 98% of humans on earth die, then gold will be worthless. However I would point out that such a scenario has never happened in all of recorded history.
In all of recorded history up until somewhere about the 19th century, there were multiple essentially independent civilizations. It would take a staggering coincidence or a global physical catastrophe (like a dino asteroid) to take them all down at once. In the modern era there is just one civilization. Every place is interconnected with every other and becoming more so. A large enough, fast enough, regional catastrophe could bring everything down if the areas not directly affected can not replace what was lost quickly enough to keep their own machinery from grinding to a halt.
Further, modern technology has given us the means to create global catastrophes. We don't need to wait for the exceedingly rare natural global catastrophe.
Gold is a good hedge against economic chaos causing fiat currencies to lose value. But if the machinery actually stops, it is pretty worthless.
My suggestion is stop believing this crap "Old Grad", you're hardly old, and you're just as able as anyone to pursue this.
I doubt the OP is concerned about being unable. The concern is convincing a prospective employer. 'Been there, done that.
I graduated in 1990. After nearly 7 years of high effort, I finally landed my first engineering job in 1997. What I found is that, even well into the DotCom boom,it was very difficult to get traction. Customers understood experienced engineers. While the demand was less, they knew what to do with fresh grads too. They did not know what to do with or even want to spend the time on an "old grad", someone out of school several years but without relevant work experience. I took numerous extension classes. I carried around prototype board of a project Is working on and eventually go through to two firms at a job fair.
Hardware is harder nut to crack then software, of course but I also had a much more lively economy to work with and I was 7 years out, rather than 12. So, it is not obvious is the OP's task is more or less challenging than mine.
That's not hard to answer. Nobody wants to spend hours on the phone with somebody who:
Modern call centres appear to be designed specifically to infuriate people by politely wasting their time without solving any problems.
No. No. No. The purpose of the modern call center is to "solve" customer problems in the most cost efficient manner. If the customer goes away and keeps paying without the company needing to spend resources to fix something, that is a good result. It gets even better if this can be accomplished while paying the customer service rep as little as possible.
It is, of course, a delicate balancing act. Go too cheap and you lose customers. Spend too much and it cuts into the bottom line. The robot training is an attempt to get more successful outcomes (continued customer revenue) without the excessive cost of actually solving problems. Keeping customers "happy" while you screw them is key.
It looks like it just a means of hosting content directly on Facebook. I don't think this means that content will stuffed into the newfeeds of people who didn't ask for it or auto-posted to the walls of those who did. Both would be very bad.
http://tech.slashdot.org/story...
Airliners only need one set of windows at the front, for the pilots. But there's a row of windows on either side, and the seats next to those windows are the second-most-popular (after those on the aisle) despite the fact that they're the most difficult to get in and out of, have no access to the overhead bins, and offer less head/foot room. See also: trains, buses, passenger ferries. So I think the answer is yes: robot cars will still have windows.
The window seats have more room than either the center or aisle seats. The aisle seats do allow extra leg room by using the aisle. However, when the service cart rolls up, the window seat has the advantage.
I'm 6'2" with a 36" inseam. I generally prefer the aisle for the stretch out option but I see the utility of the window seat. The middle seat is painful, of course, as I experienced Sunday on a four hour flight where no other options were available. Mercifully, the passenger in front did not try to recline.
It's hard to take seriously an article claiming New York is the most wasteful megacity when they don't even mention Los Angeles. New York metro is 20 million. Los Angeles metro is 18 million.
How does this work with checked luggage? Presumably your stuff won't be pulled from baggage if you aren't expected to get off in Chicago, but instead in LA.
Obviously, if you only have carry on luggage, that works fine.
It doesn't work with checked luggage. It doesn't work with route trip tickets either. The airlines fixed that a long time ago. If you don't get on the second leg, they cancel your return flight.
What really the trick doesn't work for the kinds of flights most people actually take.
The best part about legislating what kinds of technology people can use is that only legal entities must abide by the law.
So, the "good companies" or "good individuals" who agree with you are now penalized by having back-doors while anyone "bad" is "free" to use solid and effective tools.
Bullet, meet foot.
Actually, this is useful from a law enforcement perspective. Much in the way that Al Capone was convicted of tax evasion rather than racketeering, anybody caught using illegal encryption could be arrested and convicted for that without having to prove that they were doing anything else nefarious.
Bad idea for other reasons but definitely useful.
I would expect the whole surface of the (dwarf) planet to be ice, much like all the other outer system objects too small to be gas giants. It would not necessarily be water ice and TFA did not suggest that it was water. In a region where methane and co2 freeze there are lots of options and water ice would not be favorite for a polar cap.
Actually, the only information so far is: "There is a spot that is brighter than the rest. We don't know why."
Why would anybody want this? I can't think of any mobile apps that would be useful on a regular computer. Most of the really useful mobile apps are only really specific to the fact they're being run on a mobile device, and/or are really only helpful for bridging a gap between a phone and a computer.
While "really useful" is not the word I would use to describe them, Hinge and Tinder are mobile only. Neither has a web site that does more than point to a mobile app.
As I recall, some Craiglist scraping apps had features unavailable on any web site or desktop application.
Waze finally has a useful web interface after years of only being able to check routes on the mobile app.
Lyft and Uber call themselves Ridesharing, but they are actually a taxi for hire service
Last week I took Uber to SFO. I shared the car with another guy who was also going to SFO. The UberDude picked that guy up, then picked me up.
That's a share-taxi. A ride share would be if the UberDude dropped you off at the terminal, then parked the car and got on a plane.
to free up the name name for the inevitable 7" smart phone.