That is why I advocate that we need real labeling laws where the full information for a product is available online and you just scan something like a QR code with the food. That way you can put in all your food biases into your cell phone and then just scan the food to see if it is okay.
Adding an Organic or GMO label doesn't help you make an informed decision it just makes it easy for you to make a decision that you feel better about but has done nothing for you. The problem is that decisions are being made based on fear and lack of understanding and long term that hurts everyone.
I just can't support playing in to people's fears and giving information that does not actually help in any way.
If this happens the very next thing that anti-GMO people will start saying it that if it was not dangerous it would not have a special label and then they will push to ban it for safety reasons even though no such reasons exist. The anti-GMO thing is almost 100% based on some kind of food religion and not on any science and I do not want to play into that crap.
Food needs to have COMPLETE labels. That means all the chemicals the food is grown with, DNA, protein expression, presiticides, herbicides, heavy metals, location, fair trade etc etc etc. Then you just scan it with a phone. Partway just does more harm than good.
This statement is completely wrong and that is what makes me sad about this whole debate. People make decisions that they are not qualified to make.
Selective breeding is MUCH less predictable than direct gene editing. With gene editing I know exactly what I am inserting and where it goes and like a computer program I also know what it does.
With selective breeding you are selecting for visible traits and not for the DNA. Selective breeding of tomatoes to make them solid red also dramatically cut their nutrition content. The tomatoes that where red with a little green on the top where healthier for us but selective breeding eliminated healthy parts along with selecting for solid red.
The same has been done with corn and many other foods we eat.
If you want to make a plant more drought resistant then directly add the gene for it, Don't try to selectively breed for it since you will get a lot of other changes to the plant also.
Do you want research and development to be done on seeds that have been engineered to get all or part of their nitrogen from the air? It is a major area of research to make nitrogen fixing plants and it would HEAVILY cut the usage of fertilizers and that would have a HUGE environmental benefit.
If it takes decades to get it to work right and billions of dollars but you can't license the technology you realize we won't get that tech right?
Would it be better for us as a species if the seed company was able to make and license those seeds and tell them at a price where the farmer pays more for the seed that a regular seed but less for fertilizer so in the end the farmer pays less than they do now? The environment is helped and the farmer is better off than before and the research gets done.
There is lots of effort in trying to make the food healthier and better for the environment. All of that would go away if you can't own and license the seeds for at least a limited time. The problem is that this effort takes many billions of dollars and large teams of scientists to do the work. Government is not funding this research on anything other than a trivial scale. If you ever want to see this actually get used then allowing a corp to temporarily own their work and charge for it is the only way.
Monocultures are a huge problem but they are not a GMO problem. Organic and GMO are both grown as monocultures.
It is not a data point and it has never been a data point. It is a useless label designed to promote fear.
When you buy Organic potatoes does it tell you that they have been sprayed with heavy metals as a fungicide instead of the much safer chemical methods?
When you buy Organic does it tell you that the seeds where mutated with completely natural and organic radiation to scramble the genome and then grown with expressed traits as the standard for which ones work?
When you buy Organic does it tell you that chemical mutagens where applied to allow two plants to cross breed? Did you think that cross breeding is something actually natural and happens without help?
Does the GMO label tell you what gene was inserted? Does it tell you where it was inserted? Does it tell you how it was inserted? A GMO label tells you absolutely nothing of any value at all and it just promotes fear.
Our focus was on understanding and not on memorization. We solved many problems and had lab classes to get a real understanding of what is reasonable and what isn't.
I remember a lot of the theory for how different separation processes work in chemical engineering and the general pros and cons of different methods and what to look out for etc but I would have to look up the equations to actually solve problems with them. Memorizing the equations doesn't do you any good and most of the times you have many different equations for different pieces of equipment.
The goal is to learn and test understanding. All the facts you can look up. There is no reason to memorize the heat transfer equations for transverse over offset pipes or along offset pipes or the heat capacities of different solutions etc.
The coding example is a good one. I do parameter estimation problems right now and I know lots of different methods for solving problems and when I can use them and when I can't. However, I could not write very many of them from memory and would have to look them up.
You need to know the general ideas you don't have to memorize all the details.
For instance I solve very complex non-linear optimization problems. I need to have a general understanding of what optimization strategies work under different kinds of problems and how the goal impacts the solution. I do not need to memorize the details of all the different solvers, I can trivially look that information up.
Memorization is a waste of time and effort and nothing you do will keep the information anyways. Your brain is very good at realizing what information is easy to find and it will delete the information as soon as you are not constantly using it and trying to keep it in memory.
Thankfully my undergrad did this and the exams where almost all open book, notes, calculator etc a few where even open laptop with internet access and if you did not understand the material you would fail badly. If you understood the material the exams where challenging but not too bad and you could look up anything you needed.
Any exam that can be trivialized with just raw data is worthless as an exam. Too many confuse education with memorization.
Instead rewrite the test so that aids like this don't help.
Make the test assuming students have access to pretty much all information and make the test about actual understanding of the material. If a test can be trivialized due to cheating it is a bad test to begin with.
The math test sounds like an example of a good test, same for my engineering exams. 95% or so of the points where for defining all the equations, knowns, unknowns, make sure there where enough equations for all the unknowns, showing the understanding of the problem etc. and 5% was for actually solving the problem. As it stands today humans define problems, computers solve them and humans interpret the results and make sure they are sane.
I have encountered so many students from a calculus class that could solve a math problem if given to them in the notation used in the class but given a word problem where they had to define the actual equation and then evaluate if the answer was reasonable they where completely lost. In real life you have to define the equation yourself and also figure out if the answer is reasonable and schools almost never teach that part and memorization does NOT help with those problems.
I know this probably sounds strange but I fully support things like this existing.
The reason people use them and the reason they help on exams is many exams are 100% memorization based. EVERYTHING that students can do to fight back against those kinds of exams should be done. There is really no way to justify a memorization based exam existing anymore. Memorization is something humans are getting worse at physically due to changes in the brain.
Your brain basically has X neural cells and it can change what it uses them for. As technology has improved many of those cells have been tasked to do processing instead of memory. There is just no real reason to memorize anymore and it is completely ineffective. Most memorized material is forgotten within a few days at most.
I really like my undergraduate engineering exams. Most of them where open book, notes, calculator etc and we where tested on actual understanding of the material. If you did not know what you where doing you would fail the exam and no amount of notes, books etc could help that. If you knew what you where doing you spent your time working on the problem and looking up any formulas, constants etc you would need. I have even had a few exams that where open internet.
We have the ability to look up pretty much any fact at any time. What we don't have the ability to do is instantly understand those facts. That is why you have to learn how to understand the material but any details you can look up.
It won't be too long before students will have microchips in their heads and can download pretty much anything they want into them. Memorization exams will die but professors will have to be fought at every step and dragged into the modern world kicking and screaming. In the end it will probably even end up in some supreme court case where it is made very clear you can't force someone to turn off a microchip inside their brain just because you belong to an archaic belief system and can't handle that memorization is not a replacement for understanding and education.
I don't like driving at all and if someone gave me a Porsche, Ferrari, Lamborghini etc I would sell it and if I could get a self driving car I would otherwise I would just save the money for now. I look at cars as a way to get from point A to point B and I don't want to be bothered in any way by them.
What I want is a safe self-driving electric car that can take itself to the repair shop or call for help when needed and arrange a replacement so I can worry about other things.
The only problem is that insurance is based on risk pools. This means that as people switch to self driving cars the risk pool for cars that people drive shrinks and by definition they are the most unsafe drivers compared to the autodrive cars. This will mean insurance will go up and move people will stop driving their cars for money reasons and the insurance will keep going up.
Eventually very few people will be able to drive their own cars no matter what their views on on it since they won't be able to afford the insurance. Not sure if I really like that endpoint very much but it would end up with a much safer world and much faster transport.
Maybe there should be more tracks and designated areas for people to drive for themselves or something.
You will have the freedom to do this if you can afford the insurance.
Insurance is based on risk pools. Over time the risk pool for people that drive themselves will become smaller and smaller and end up as the highest risk category and so insurance will be much more expensive.
The government won't have to stop you from driving a car yourself. Insurance will end up pricing most people out of that market before government is ever involved.
How fast MATLAB runs will vary based on how much CPU time it can get. If Xorg+WM takes more CPU time than Windows does then MATLAB won't have as much CPU time to run with.
Anything that makes the OS offload more work or do work more intelligently will increase the speed of any cpu bound operation. Just like you do the same total number of operations if you use a triple nested loop to multiply two matrixes or you use xGEMM. However the xGEMM version will run almost 100x faster since it uses the CPU FAR more efficiently. If Microsoft has made their system more highly optimized and better at offloading that would make MATLAB faster.
Actually the grandparent is right. Windows has gotten much more performance over the last few versions. With Windows 7 MATLAB ran about 20% faster on Linux than Windows. With Windows 8 the Windows version was very slightly faster and with Windows 10 the different is about 5% now in favor of windows.
Overall I suspect it is nothing magical. Microsoft has just worked very hard to offload more work to the GPU and also to optimize many other aspects of their systems for power usage. I get about an hour more battery life on windows vs linux.
Skylake chips support some new power management features that allow the chip to throttle based on load far more efficiently than older chips. Microsoft is not adding special support to that to Windows 7 for example. The chip will still work on Windows 7 but not all features will work.
If you use a Debian install from 5 years ago it also won't support any of those new power management features and they are not going to backport those features. You can install a new kernel and a new version of some of the power management libraries, that will probably involve rebuilding a lot of user space and in the end you are probably going to break something else. What you would have to do is just use a distribution new enough to support all the features on your new processor.
OSX is going to do EXACTLY the same thing. Apple is not going to backport skylake power management to a 5 year old version of OSX and all the risks that could have. They are going to take the newest version, work out the details on that, validate it and support it.
Intels and AMDs new processors will continue to work on older Windows and Linux versions just like before. It is just that Microsoft has officially announced they are not going to backport new processor features to older operating system versions.
It is even worse than that. If you provide a host population for a virus it will mutate over time. It could mutate around the vaccine the others have taken and become generally infectious again.
One of the things many in medicine are worried about is that anti-vax people are going to provide a host population and something like measles will mutate and go back to killing millions of people. It is unlikely that we will come up with a new vaccine very quickly and even if the government makes this a crash project and devotes insane resources to it progress could still be slow.
For many of these diseases that we can vaccinate against we have nothing else. The diseases are still deadly and we don't really have a way to treat them.
The worst problem is that this outcome is inevitable if you have a host population. Anti-vax people put EVERYONE else at risk and it is just a matter of time until it happens.
This is why vaccines should be 100% mandatory unless there is a valid medical reason. I don't care what your religion, personal beliefs etc are. If you are going to live around other people you have to be vacinated.
Using a GPU to render a website allows faster rendering with lower power usage.
Think of all the elements on a page that can be composited with something designed to do it with different levels of transparency.
If you want laptops and mobiles to run faster and last longer on battery power then part of that is using computer resources more efficiently. Lots of stuff right now is wasted and the CPU is busy with memory IO due to poor algorithms.
Well the software I am talking about is the result of a lot of very difficult research that has taken many years to do. The people writing the software are doing the research.
There is no simple algorithm that a professor came up. It is a complex physical model and it is highly non-trivial to figure out which parts need to be modeled and why to get the correct physical behavior.
Others use the software to try and solve a specific problem that would have been impossible without a lot of very hard work in getting the technology to do it. That work should be given credit since in the academic community credit is all that really matters for your career long term. That is one reason I don't like academia and look forward to finishing and going back into corporate research.
This is a horrible comparison. Shakespeare could have done his plays in any theater.
I am talking about custom written software that solves an EXTREMELY narrow niche and without it a lot of the research in the field would not even happen.
A lot of scientific software is extremely specific and designed to enable very specific types of research. There are many fields where there are 1 or 2 pieces of software exist and they where written inside the community.
They most certainly should get credit for writing that software and enabling very specific research since in many cases without the software the research would not even exist.
There is a possibility these super heavy atoms could be stabilized if they could react and form a molecule. They could even have very useful properties. Even if they don't exist for long right now they are distinct elements from anything else on the periodic table.
Chemical reactions take place on the order of a few femtoseconds so there is FAR more than enough time for these things to react and make a stable molecule. Look at uranium. On its own it decays as a radioactive compound but if turned into uraninite it is stable and far less dangerous.
For numerical work modern CPUs have gotten MUCH MUCH faster than older CPUs. Things like FMA, more vector ops, load and store two cache lines per cycle etc. These features are hard to take advantage of in higher level languages but modern cpus are vastly faster than older ones. For any normal users modern cpus are fast enough. If you need higher performance in games and simulation software you can write your code to use the CPU more effectively.
In the end a GPU is really not any faster than a CPU but a GPU forces you to write your code in a way that is more efficient on a vector processor. You can make the same kind of changes for a CPU can get a HUGE performance boost.
Genes already cross between species. It is not as hard as many people think. On a biological timescale it is actually pretty fast.
Saying that something is done with GMO or Organic is not like writing pork on something. GMO is not something in a food and neither is Organic.
We do label food for contents.
Radiation and chemical mutagens will eventually produce a plant with a protein similar enough to the one on peanuts that causes allergic reactions. Labeling something as Organic does not change that in any way. It is a useless label and devoid of information.
All food should be tested. Our technology is advanced enough that all food should have DNA and protein assays stored on a government website. That way you could have a smart phone app and list what you don't want in your food (allergens, religious objections etc) and simple scan a QR code on the food and your phone could tell if the food is okay. Labeling GMO or Organic is never going to help you.
That you even call it a mutant organism indicates you really don't understand this technology and are acting out of fear. Sure we what do in the lab is not a conventional process but the methods we use in the lab are the SAME methods that nature fundamentally uses. CRISPR is taken from a natural source and all of this stuff we have learned from nature. Genetic engineering is darn safe and pretty easy to do now. The real danger is in radiation and chemical mutagens since they are more random.
If you create labels that you know are going to feed into panic and many of the supporters of labeling have a stated goal and making people react out of fear then you are not helping people. Labeling something as GMO is not going to help anyone and it is going to be used to create harm.
In the end I don't see the point in informing the public on an issue they are not qualified to make a decision on. If we want to have better food labeling we also need to have better education to go with that so people can make rational decisions.
I am growing sick of tired of people wanting GMO labelled or touting Organic and some kind of magically safe food.
Labeling GMO tells you NOTHING. It is a completely worthless label. You have no idea what was changed, what impact it has, etc. The only usage of the label is to drive FEAR and I am tired of it.
Organic is not inherently safe either. Almost all deaths related to ecoli in lettuce or spinach have been from Organic produce. Organic also allows the usage of heavy metals to fight blight in potatoes. It also allows spraying Bt toxin on plants (and does so in huge quantities) where it runs off into the water and damages fish. Apparently Bt toxin is safe when you spray it on plants but when you engineer it in so it it still kills insects but very little runs off into the water so you don't harm so many fish that is somehow bad.
Worse you can use radiation and chemical mutagens for cross-breeding and for manipulation in a single plant since those methods are approved as Organic. Farmers have used these methods for quite a long time to get plants to cross breed, they just did not know how they worked until recently.These methods are far more unsafe than direct genetic manipulation.
In the end I see people ruled by fear and trying to cover it with pseudo science bullshit. It is getting so tiring to see it. You can't have a rational conversation since the VAST majority of people against GMO I have talked to have not based their decision on anything rational.
Maybe science is still too new. It is really only a few hundred years old and there are just not enough humans that understand and accept it yet. We are capable of doing so much better than we do now. We can make energy cleanly, produce enough food, not harm the environment that supports us, have air and water that are safe to breath and drink and none of that is going to happen because too many are controlled by FEAR and too many others in power have too much to gain with the current way things are run.
Sometimes I wish there was a way to abandon ship and just leave this planet. Find others that are tired of this stuff also and head off into space.
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That is why I advocate that we need real labeling laws where the full information for a product is available online and you just scan something like a QR code with the food. That way you can put in all your food biases into your cell phone and then just scan the food to see if it is okay.
Adding an Organic or GMO label doesn't help you make an informed decision it just makes it easy for you to make a decision that you feel better about but has done nothing for you. The problem is that decisions are being made based on fear and lack of understanding and long term that hurts everyone.
I just can't support playing in to people's fears and giving information that does not actually help in any way.
If this happens the very next thing that anti-GMO people will start saying it that if it was not dangerous it would not have a special label and then they will push to ban it for safety reasons even though no such reasons exist. The anti-GMO thing is almost 100% based on some kind of food religion and not on any science and I do not want to play into that crap.
Food needs to have COMPLETE labels. That means all the chemicals the food is grown with, DNA, protein expression, presiticides, herbicides, heavy metals, location, fair trade etc etc etc. Then you just scan it with a phone. Partway just does more harm than good.
This statement is completely wrong and that is what makes me sad about this whole debate. People make decisions that they are not qualified to make.
Selective breeding is MUCH less predictable than direct gene editing. With gene editing I know exactly what I am inserting and where it goes and like a computer program I also know what it does.
With selective breeding you are selecting for visible traits and not for the DNA. Selective breeding of tomatoes to make them solid red also dramatically cut their nutrition content. The tomatoes that where red with a little green on the top where healthier for us but selective breeding eliminated healthy parts along with selecting for solid red.
The same has been done with corn and many other foods we eat.
If you want to make a plant more drought resistant then directly add the gene for it, Don't try to selectively breed for it since you will get a lot of other changes to the plant also.
Do you want research and development to be done on seeds that have been engineered to get all or part of their nitrogen from the air? It is a major area of research to make nitrogen fixing plants and it would HEAVILY cut the usage of fertilizers and that would have a HUGE environmental benefit.
If it takes decades to get it to work right and billions of dollars but you can't license the technology you realize we won't get that tech right?
Would it be better for us as a species if the seed company was able to make and license those seeds and tell them at a price where the farmer pays more for the seed that a regular seed but less for fertilizer so in the end the farmer pays less than they do now? The environment is helped and the farmer is better off than before and the research gets done.
There is lots of effort in trying to make the food healthier and better for the environment. All of that would go away if you can't own and license the seeds for at least a limited time. The problem is that this effort takes many billions of dollars and large teams of scientists to do the work. Government is not funding this research on anything other than a trivial scale. If you ever want to see this actually get used then allowing a corp to temporarily own their work and charge for it is the only way.
Monocultures are a huge problem but they are not a GMO problem. Organic and GMO are both grown as monocultures.
It is not a data point and it has never been a data point. It is a useless label designed to promote fear.
When you buy Organic potatoes does it tell you that they have been sprayed with heavy metals as a fungicide instead of the much safer chemical methods?
When you buy Organic does it tell you that the seeds where mutated with completely natural and organic radiation to scramble the genome and then grown with expressed traits as the standard for which ones work?
When you buy Organic does it tell you that chemical mutagens where applied to allow two plants to cross breed? Did you think that cross breeding is something actually natural and happens without help?
Does the GMO label tell you what gene was inserted? Does it tell you where it was inserted? Does it tell you how it was inserted? A GMO label tells you absolutely nothing of any value at all and it just promotes fear.
Our focus was on understanding and not on memorization. We solved many problems and had lab classes to get a real understanding of what is reasonable and what isn't.
I remember a lot of the theory for how different separation processes work in chemical engineering and the general pros and cons of different methods and what to look out for etc but I would have to look up the equations to actually solve problems with them. Memorizing the equations doesn't do you any good and most of the times you have many different equations for different pieces of equipment.
The goal is to learn and test understanding. All the facts you can look up. There is no reason to memorize the heat transfer equations for transverse over offset pipes or along offset pipes or the heat capacities of different solutions etc.
The coding example is a good one. I do parameter estimation problems right now and I know lots of different methods for solving problems and when I can use them and when I can't. However, I could not write very many of them from memory and would have to look them up.
You need to know the general ideas you don't have to memorize all the details.
For instance I solve very complex non-linear optimization problems. I need to have a general understanding of what optimization strategies work under different kinds of problems and how the goal impacts the solution. I do not need to memorize the details of all the different solvers, I can trivially look that information up.
Memorization is a waste of time and effort and nothing you do will keep the information anyways. Your brain is very good at realizing what information is easy to find and it will delete the information as soon as you are not constantly using it and trying to keep it in memory.
I agree with this entirely.
Thankfully my undergrad did this and the exams where almost all open book, notes, calculator etc a few where even open laptop with internet access and if you did not understand the material you would fail badly. If you understood the material the exams where challenging but not too bad and you could look up anything you needed.
Any exam that can be trivialized with just raw data is worthless as an exam. Too many confuse education with memorization.
Instead rewrite the test so that aids like this don't help.
Make the test assuming students have access to pretty much all information and make the test about actual understanding of the material. If a test can be trivialized due to cheating it is a bad test to begin with.
The math test sounds like an example of a good test, same for my engineering exams. 95% or so of the points where for defining all the equations, knowns, unknowns, make sure there where enough equations for all the unknowns, showing the understanding of the problem etc. and 5% was for actually solving the problem. As it stands today humans define problems, computers solve them and humans interpret the results and make sure they are sane.
I have encountered so many students from a calculus class that could solve a math problem if given to them in the notation used in the class but given a word problem where they had to define the actual equation and then evaluate if the answer was reasonable they where completely lost. In real life you have to define the equation yourself and also figure out if the answer is reasonable and schools almost never teach that part and memorization does NOT help with those problems.
I know this probably sounds strange but I fully support things like this existing.
The reason people use them and the reason they help on exams is many exams are 100% memorization based. EVERYTHING that students can do to fight back against those kinds of exams should be done. There is really no way to justify a memorization based exam existing anymore. Memorization is something humans are getting worse at physically due to changes in the brain.
Your brain basically has X neural cells and it can change what it uses them for. As technology has improved many of those cells have been tasked to do processing instead of memory. There is just no real reason to memorize anymore and it is completely ineffective. Most memorized material is forgotten within a few days at most.
I really like my undergraduate engineering exams. Most of them where open book, notes, calculator etc and we where tested on actual understanding of the material. If you did not know what you where doing you would fail the exam and no amount of notes, books etc could help that. If you knew what you where doing you spent your time working on the problem and looking up any formulas, constants etc you would need. I have even had a few exams that where open internet.
We have the ability to look up pretty much any fact at any time. What we don't have the ability to do is instantly understand those facts. That is why you have to learn how to understand the material but any details you can look up.
It won't be too long before students will have microchips in their heads and can download pretty much anything they want into them. Memorization exams will die but professors will have to be fought at every step and dragged into the modern world kicking and screaming. In the end it will probably even end up in some supreme court case where it is made very clear you can't force someone to turn off a microchip inside their brain just because you belong to an archaic belief system and can't handle that memorization is not a replacement for understanding and education.
I agree with what you said pretty much.
I don't like driving at all and if someone gave me a Porsche, Ferrari, Lamborghini etc I would sell it and if I could get a self driving car I would otherwise I would just save the money for now. I look at cars as a way to get from point A to point B and I don't want to be bothered in any way by them.
What I want is a safe self-driving electric car that can take itself to the repair shop or call for help when needed and arrange a replacement so I can worry about other things.
The only problem is that insurance is based on risk pools. This means that as people switch to self driving cars the risk pool for cars that people drive shrinks and by definition they are the most unsafe drivers compared to the autodrive cars. This will mean insurance will go up and move people will stop driving their cars for money reasons and the insurance will keep going up.
Eventually very few people will be able to drive their own cars no matter what their views on on it since they won't be able to afford the insurance. Not sure if I really like that endpoint very much but it would end up with a much safer world and much faster transport.
Maybe there should be more tracks and designated areas for people to drive for themselves or something.
You will have the freedom to do this if you can afford the insurance.
Insurance is based on risk pools. Over time the risk pool for people that drive themselves will become smaller and smaller and end up as the highest risk category and so insurance will be much more expensive.
The government won't have to stop you from driving a car yourself. Insurance will end up pricing most people out of that market before government is ever involved.
I would love this.
Steam recently started doing this and it is great. I am in Germany and I can still buy US games on my US account in US prices.
All I want from Netflix is to watch the USA version with my USA account.
How fast MATLAB runs will vary based on how much CPU time it can get. If Xorg+WM takes more CPU time than Windows does then MATLAB won't have as much CPU time to run with.
Anything that makes the OS offload more work or do work more intelligently will increase the speed of any cpu bound operation. Just like you do the same total number of operations if you use a triple nested loop to multiply two matrixes or you use xGEMM. However the xGEMM version will run almost 100x faster since it uses the CPU FAR more efficiently. If Microsoft has made their system more highly optimized and better at offloading that would make MATLAB faster.
Actually the grandparent is right. Windows has gotten much more performance over the last few versions. With Windows 7 MATLAB ran about 20% faster on Linux than Windows. With Windows 8 the Windows version was very slightly faster and with Windows 10 the different is about 5% now in favor of windows.
Overall I suspect it is nothing magical. Microsoft has just worked very hard to offload more work to the GPU and also to optimize many other aspects of their systems for power usage. I get about an hour more battery life on windows vs linux.
Skylake chips support some new power management features that allow the chip to throttle based on load far more efficiently than older chips. Microsoft is not adding special support to that to Windows 7 for example. The chip will still work on Windows 7 but not all features will work.
If you use a Debian install from 5 years ago it also won't support any of those new power management features and they are not going to backport those features. You can install a new kernel and a new version of some of the power management libraries, that will probably involve rebuilding a lot of user space and in the end you are probably going to break something else. What you would have to do is just use a distribution new enough to support all the features on your new processor.
OSX is going to do EXACTLY the same thing. Apple is not going to backport skylake power management to a 5 year old version of OSX and all the risks that could have. They are going to take the newest version, work out the details on that, validate it and support it.
Intels and AMDs new processors will continue to work on older Windows and Linux versions just like before. It is just that Microsoft has officially announced they are not going to backport new processor features to older operating system versions.
It is even worse than that. If you provide a host population for a virus it will mutate over time. It could mutate around the vaccine the others have taken and become generally infectious again.
One of the things many in medicine are worried about is that anti-vax people are going to provide a host population and something like measles will mutate and go back to killing millions of people. It is unlikely that we will come up with a new vaccine very quickly and even if the government makes this a crash project and devotes insane resources to it progress could still be slow.
For many of these diseases that we can vaccinate against we have nothing else. The diseases are still deadly and we don't really have a way to treat them.
The worst problem is that this outcome is inevitable if you have a host population. Anti-vax people put EVERYONE else at risk and it is just a matter of time until it happens.
This is why vaccines should be 100% mandatory unless there is a valid medical reason. I don't care what your religion, personal beliefs etc are. If you are going to live around other people you have to be vacinated.
Using a GPU to render a website allows faster rendering with lower power usage.
Think of all the elements on a page that can be composited with something designed to do it with different levels of transparency.
If you want laptops and mobiles to run faster and last longer on battery power then part of that is using computer resources more efficiently. Lots of stuff right now is wasted and the CPU is busy with memory IO due to poor algorithms.
It has had lots of research papers. However, when people use it the software/papers should also be cited.
Well the software I am talking about is the result of a lot of very difficult research that has taken many years to do. The people writing the software are doing the research.
There is no simple algorithm that a professor came up. It is a complex physical model and it is highly non-trivial to figure out which parts need to be modeled and why to get the correct physical behavior.
Others use the software to try and solve a specific problem that would have been impossible without a lot of very hard work in getting the technology to do it. That work should be given credit since in the academic community credit is all that really matters for your career long term. That is one reason I don't like academia and look forward to finishing and going back into corporate research.
This is a horrible comparison. Shakespeare could have done his plays in any theater.
I am talking about custom written software that solves an EXTREMELY narrow niche and without it a lot of the research in the field would not even happen.
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A lot of scientific software is extremely specific and designed to enable very specific types of research. There are many fields where there are 1 or 2 pieces of software exist and they where written inside the community.
They most certainly should get credit for writing that software and enabling very specific research since in many cases without the software the research would not even exist.
There is a possibility these super heavy atoms could be stabilized if they could react and form a molecule. They could even have very useful properties. Even if they don't exist for long right now they are distinct elements from anything else on the periodic table.
Chemical reactions take place on the order of a few femtoseconds so there is FAR more than enough time for these things to react and make a stable molecule. Look at uranium. On its own it decays as a radioactive compound but if turned into uraninite it is stable and far less dangerous.
For numerical work modern CPUs have gotten MUCH MUCH faster than older CPUs. Things like FMA, more vector ops, load and store two cache lines per cycle etc. These features are hard to take advantage of in higher level languages but modern cpus are vastly faster than older ones. For any normal users modern cpus are fast enough. If you need higher performance in games and simulation software you can write your code to use the CPU more effectively.
In the end a GPU is really not any faster than a CPU but a GPU forces you to write your code in a way that is more efficient on a vector processor. You can make the same kind of changes for a CPU can get a HUGE performance boost.
Genes already cross between species. It is not as hard as many people think. On a biological timescale it is actually pretty fast.
Saying that something is done with GMO or Organic is not like writing pork on something. GMO is not something in a food and neither is Organic.
We do label food for contents.
Radiation and chemical mutagens will eventually produce a plant with a protein similar enough to the one on peanuts that causes allergic reactions. Labeling something as Organic does not change that in any way. It is a useless label and devoid of information.
All food should be tested. Our technology is advanced enough that all food should have DNA and protein assays stored on a government website. That way you could have a smart phone app and list what you don't want in your food (allergens, religious objections etc) and simple scan a QR code on the food and your phone could tell if the food is okay. Labeling GMO or Organic is never going to help you.
That you even call it a mutant organism indicates you really don't understand this technology and are acting out of fear. Sure we what do in the lab is not a conventional process but the methods we use in the lab are the SAME methods that nature fundamentally uses. CRISPR is taken from a natural source and all of this stuff we have learned from nature. Genetic engineering is darn safe and pretty easy to do now. The real danger is in radiation and chemical mutagens since they are more random.
If you create labels that you know are going to feed into panic and many of the supporters of labeling have a stated goal and making people react out of fear then you are not helping people. Labeling something as GMO is not going to help anyone and it is going to be used to create harm.
In the end I don't see the point in informing the public on an issue they are not qualified to make a decision on. If we want to have better food labeling we also need to have better education to go with that so people can make rational decisions.
I am growing sick of tired of people wanting GMO labelled or touting Organic and some kind of magically safe food.
Labeling GMO tells you NOTHING. It is a completely worthless label. You have no idea what was changed, what impact it has, etc. The only usage of the label is to drive FEAR and I am tired of it.
Organic is not inherently safe either. Almost all deaths related to ecoli in lettuce or spinach have been from Organic produce. Organic also allows the usage of heavy metals to fight blight in potatoes. It also allows spraying Bt toxin on plants (and does so in huge quantities) where it runs off into the water and damages fish. Apparently Bt toxin is safe when you spray it on plants but when you engineer it in so it it still kills insects but very little runs off into the water so you don't harm so many fish that is somehow bad.
Worse you can use radiation and chemical mutagens for cross-breeding and for manipulation in a single plant since those methods are approved as Organic. Farmers have used these methods for quite a long time to get plants to cross breed, they just did not know how they worked until recently.These methods are far more unsafe than direct genetic manipulation.
In the end I see people ruled by fear and trying to cover it with pseudo science bullshit. It is getting so tiring to see it. You can't have a rational conversation since the VAST majority of people against GMO I have talked to have not based their decision on anything rational.
Maybe science is still too new. It is really only a few hundred years old and there are just not enough humans that understand and accept it yet. We are capable of doing so much better than we do now. We can make energy cleanly, produce enough food, not harm the environment that supports us, have air and water that are safe to breath and drink and none of that is going to happen because too many are controlled by FEAR and too many others in power have too much to gain with the current way things are run.
Sometimes I wish there was a way to abandon ship and just leave this planet. Find others that are tired of this stuff also and head off into space.