You're half right. When I started my Ph. D. in Chemistry in 1993, there was no more formal language requirement, and for a number of years prior to that grad students had to show working proficiency in one of (IIRC) German, Russian, French, or Japanese.
OTOH, there are still German chemistry journals. Angewandte Chemie publishes in both German and English, or did last time I bothered to look at the non-international version. AFAIK, several other journals such as Zeitschrift Naturforschung are still published. I think some of the journals require that the abstract appear in both languages.
Of course, many of our German colleagues speak English as well as if not better than most Americans speak English.
Our current large-ish contract price for liquid helium is about $12/L, and Praxair has been adding a nice $.50/L "contingency" fee to all orders for the past year or so. Cheapest I know of anyone getting it for is about $10/L, I know of places paying as much as $300/liter, it really depends on your contract (or lack thereof), location, usage, etc. There is regular talk of rationing, and for the most part new customers can't get liquid helium period. There's only one grade of liquid helium, BTW. Gas comes in several grades but the price isn't that different except at the really low end (balloon grade which is only about 70-80%) and really high end (99.9999+%).
Helium recapture is becoming more common, and a lot of newer imagers have re-liquefaction systems built it, but for older instruments it really only makes financial sense to recover if you use a lot. I've priced recovery systems for the NMR facility I work in and if we could capture nearly all of the ~3000 L/year that we put into our magnets I calculated a ROI period of about 12 years when helium cost more like $10/L. That excluded costs for routine maintenance of the recovery equipment, BTW.
Grim Reefer's 1500-3000 L is about right for how much it takes to cool down and energize a new system. After that, I think 20-60 L/year is about right for maintaining a newer system with built in recovery, a smaller bore imager I helped fill for about a decade used about 500 L/year.
One AC already posted part of the answer. The Supreme Court is the only court than can overturn the federal circuit courts. They get to decide which cases they hear, which are pretty limited in number. So they usually only choose to take cases that are likely to be overturned, are particularly controversial, or are of questionable Constitutionality. If it's fairly clear that they'll agree with the lower court, they refuse to hear the appeal and the lower ruling stands (and therefore doesn't bring down the overturn rate). They can also ask the lower court to reconsider a case, possibly in light of some other ruling, before deciding to hear it.
TL;DR version: the Supreme Court generally only hears cases with a reasonable chance of being overturned, the overturn rate is high.
We mostly do. But assume the phone costs $480 to make the math easier and you can:
Buy from VZ and pay over 24 months, adds exactly $20/month to the bill
Put on plastic, then either pay the entire $480 at the end of the first month OR pay usurious interest until you've paid it off. It will take way longer than 2 years to pay off if you only pay $20/month toward the credit card bill.
I also don't usually need more than about 8 GB, but there are many ways the extra RAM could be useful,. Others have already mentioned CAD or VMs, AR/VR, better/faster caching, etc. I also don't doubt people will come up with new and clever ways to exploit the extra memory.
My real concern with this, though, is that in the next year or two we'll wind up with software like Windows 11, Office 2021, and the next versions of Adobe CC applications being released and requiring so much memory that 32 GB will quickly become the minimum needed for a smoothly functioning PC. It's happened over and over and I have no reason to believe things will be different this time around.
Personally, I'd love to see devs and beta testers work on 5-10 year old hardware (feel free to compile or render on a server) so they know how their stuff will behave on what "normal" users have. It'll never happen.
I might use stronger language than merely despicable. But apparently the law to get a permit in Iowa allows any local "competitors" to challenge your application on just about any grounds. The story is almost certainly up on kcrg.com (local ABC affiliate) and/or thegazette.com (their partner newspaper).
I'm not sure where exactly the line should be drawn, but almost every other country in the world spends SIGNIFICANTLY less on healthcare and has better overall outcomes *queue unsubstantiated anecdotes about long waits for emergency care*
I would think though that moving the line somewhere so that health is more important than profits...
As a small example, last night on the local news there was a story about someone trying to open a discount surgical clinic, his permit has been denied by the state at least 4 times, at least partially on grounds that if he opens it won't be profitable for the local hospitals to do that surgery any more. I wish I was kidding.
For the author, copyright is not temporary, and has never been. It is always life + X years.
IIRC, the original period of copyright in the US was 14 years, which was later allowed to be renewed once. It stayed that way for some time. Then the increasing lengths started. There were a few increases beyond that, I think up to about 50 years total which is probably too long but still semi-sane. Once the copyright on Steamboat Willie was about to expire, the Sonny Bono copyright act came along and extended that signifcantly, and it's been extended a couple more times since.
The Constitutional purpose of copyright is to "promote progress in the useful arts and sciences" by protecting things for a "limited time". Sadly, the courts have ruled more than once that life of the author plus 70 years counts as limited, and I wouldn't be surprised if they applied the same standard to "forever minus a day".
If I had mod points today, you'd get one. I grew up one town over, and if each kid has a separate bedroom, there's no probably about the million+ price tag; my parents' much smaller house is valued at well over $700k now. And I wonder whether Neptune is considered a "commuter town" for NYC yet.
As far as I know, that mall is still there - due to work, kids, etc. I only visit NJ where I grew up about once a year, but my parents live about 20 minutes from there. I also believe Edison's workshop is still there and is a national historic site, I know we visited it in middle school
I've honestly never heard of "visual voicemail" until just now. You need to use an app for it? So I assume that it uses your data allowance? If the concern is that these bastards are costing you money, then how does that solve anything?
On my phone, I think the carrier pre-installed voicemail app is really visual voicemail - because if I want to listen to the voicemail, I just hold 1 to quick dial it. I used to regularly get a popup asking if I want to enable visual voicemail which I always declined and I think finally managed to make go away for good.
I'm not sure about all carriers, but be aware that Verizon charges a monthly fee for the completely automated visual voicemail "service".
Last year Zhang gave a talk where I work. Aside from (to me at least) coming off as very arrogant, he clearly made a huge point to NOT mention Doudna's work at any point during his talk.
It's been mentioned indirectly above, and I'm sure it took some trial and error before it worked, but I can't possibly see how tweaking a nearly identical system in prokaryotes to work in eurkaryotes isn't obvious to one "skilled in the art". I also find asking for "fast track" approval of the patent to be pretty sleazy since MIT/Broad almost certainly knew of the Berkeley patent filing. Of course, you also have to wonder why the first filing wasn't fast tracked.
For the highest bidder they will hold the games anywhere. The Olympics are just a scam for the uber rich to make money off of unpaid athletes hoping for stardom.
I partially agree, the Olympics overall have become incredibly commercial and care more about profit than anything else. But I disagree on two points. First, for some sports (swimming, diving, track and field/athletics to name a few), the Olympics are really their "spotlight" event and are important to the athletes - sure there are worlds every year but it's the only time they really get good media coverage. Second, the Olympics haven't "belonged" solely to unpaid athletes in a long time now. I can't remember exactly when the IOC first started allowing it except it was sometime after 1984, but most if not all sports allow professionals to compete in the Olympics. Some of whom are making 10s of millions each year.
Actually, no. He said they'd face some sort of disciple and listed (arguably from least to most punitive) a 30 day job suspension, loss of security clearance, and possibly getting fired as examples. Nowhere did he mention criminal charges.
This is a relatively huge deposit, agreed. We do waste a whole lot of helium. In fact, it may be that most of what's wasted is actually from natural gas fields not capturing the helium "byproduct".
I think you grossly understate that chilling it out of the air would be "signficantly" more expensive than recovering from ground reserves, it's far more expensive than that. A small helium recovery system for NMR/MRI instruments costs on the order of $200k installed, ignoring ongoing maintenance. We looked into one a few years back as helium prices rose - I manage 3 NMR instruments and we use ~60L/week of liquid helium keeping the cold - and the payback period for a recovery system at then current prices was on the order of 15 years again ignoring maintenance. That may be more like 12 years now. And that's for separating and reliquefying helium that's a very significant portion of the captured gas, not something that a small fraction of 1%. Economics get better as you use and recover more. I will say though that the newest large magnets come with built in reliquefaction systems - they still take several to many thousands of liters of liquid helium to cool and energize, but only require a small periodic topping up.
Pricing can be a bit tricky, but we pay ~$12/liter for liquid helium which is on the lower end of retail. One liter of liquid becomes something like 720 liters as a gas, so your per cubic meter price a couple of posts down is a bit low, it should be $15-20. A full party balloon has a negligible amount, though, if you figure 1/2 liter/balloon my one liter of liquid would fill almost 1500 of them, or about $0.01 each. I've filled a couple of dozen from one of our gas cylinders and the amount used didn't even register on the regulator.
My work password rules are set/enforced by hospital IT (I don't work in the hospital, but we unfortunately share IT). The rules are basically 10 characters minimum with 2 upper, 2 lower, 1 or 2 numbers, 1 non-alpha, no embedded dictionary words, some minimum level of difference compared to your last 10 passwords, and changed every 6 months. This is why you see things written down on sticky notes.
But how exactly is this a violation of "standard Windows conventions"? Clicking a corner [X] button has always been an indication of the user's desire to dismiss the window being closed and take no further action
Exactly, the key words being "take no further action". In other words, don't change anything on my computer...
The 'x' is expected to mean "close this window and take no action".
Close, but most users expect clicking the 'x' to mean something closer to "close this window without doing/changing anything". I know it's a relatively subtle distinction, but most users are going to expect that, by clicking the 'x', they're canceling the planned update, and somebody at MS is exploiting that. At best, it's mere incompetence and the exploit was unintended - this particular dialog really shouldn't even have an 'x' but a pair of large buttons: "Upgrade to Win10" and "Keep using Win7". More likely this setup is deceitful by design.
Microsoft says they'll give "an additional opportunity for cancelling the upgrade"
And that helps anyone who was automagically updated (whether they they wanted it or not) how, exactly?
I'm pretty sure my supervisor would prefer going back to Win7, but with the various reports I'm seeing of rollbacks leading to BSOD/reinstall, the risk of data loss is probably significantly worse than just going forward with Win10. We may have upgraded anyway before the free period expires, but we were certainly planning of a full system image/backup first which we never got to do because the OS updated itself overnight without notice.
No, it's the fault of the lazy, thoughtless bastard who didn't change the default setting to "automatically install recommended updates". I assume that wasn't the son?
I probably shouldn't reply to ACs, but you can't necessarily cancel, especially if you never saw the notification in the first place. We had one computer here upgrade itself fully last night - walked in this morning to see "Welcome to Windows 10". Not my PC, and AFAIK it was set to automatically apply Windows updates. I spent a good part of the morning walking my supervisor through disabling most of the phone-home stuff and "acclimating" him to some of the bigger interface changes.
Exactly. My cable TV bill was going up by too much, so I went with satellite TV, except the sat provider didn't offer internet at the time. Sadly, as the only cable co. in town, my ISP decided that having internet without TV will saddle me with a $15/month surcharge. Of course, on the record they spin that as me losing a $15/month discount. Now that my contract on the sat TV (which has also gone up) is just about finished, I'm not quite sure what we're going to do.
Maybe. But while it will probably get me labeled a blasphemer and heretic on/., I just RTFA (ok, skimmed really). The very next paragraphs starts out by saying the "base model" - i.e. the one with the $500 price tag - will very likely have lower specs, they specifically mention 1920x1080, 4 GB or 8 GB RAM, and probably a lesser CPU. It also mentions that this thing has a whopping 32 GB of storage, presumably flash memory, nor any way to add any other than USB-C.
Slashdot Mirror
You're half right. When I started my Ph. D. in Chemistry in 1993, there was no more formal language requirement, and for a number of years prior to that grad students had to show working proficiency in one of (IIRC) German, Russian, French, or Japanese.
OTOH, there are still German chemistry journals. Angewandte Chemie publishes in both German and English, or did last time I bothered to look at the non-international version. AFAIK, several other journals such as Zeitschrift Naturforschung are still published. I think some of the journals require that the abstract appear in both languages.
Of course, many of our German colleagues speak English as well as if not better than most Americans speak English.
Our current large-ish contract price for liquid helium is about $12/L, and Praxair has been adding a nice $.50/L "contingency" fee to all orders for the past year or so. Cheapest I know of anyone getting it for is about $10/L, I know of places paying as much as $300/liter, it really depends on your contract (or lack thereof), location, usage, etc. There is regular talk of rationing, and for the most part new customers can't get liquid helium period. There's only one grade of liquid helium, BTW. Gas comes in several grades but the price isn't that different except at the really low end (balloon grade which is only about 70-80%) and really high end (99.9999+%).
Helium recapture is becoming more common, and a lot of newer imagers have re-liquefaction systems built it, but for older instruments it really only makes financial sense to recover if you use a lot. I've priced recovery systems for the NMR facility I work in and if we could capture nearly all of the ~3000 L/year that we put into our magnets I calculated a ROI period of about 12 years when helium cost more like $10/L. That excluded costs for routine maintenance of the recovery equipment, BTW.
Grim Reefer's 1500-3000 L is about right for how much it takes to cool down and energize a new system. After that, I think 20-60 L/year is about right for maintaining a newer system with built in recovery, a smaller bore imager I helped fill for about a decade used about 500 L/year.
One AC already posted part of the answer. The Supreme Court is the only court than can overturn the federal circuit courts. They get to decide which cases they hear, which are pretty limited in number. So they usually only choose to take cases that are likely to be overturned, are particularly controversial, or are of questionable Constitutionality. If it's fairly clear that they'll agree with the lower court, they refuse to hear the appeal and the lower ruling stands (and therefore doesn't bring down the overturn rate). They can also ask the lower court to reconsider a case, possibly in light of some other ruling, before deciding to hear it.
TL;DR version: the Supreme Court generally only hears cases with a reasonable chance of being overturned, the overturn rate is high.
We mostly do. But assume the phone costs $480 to make the math easier and you can:
I also don't usually need more than about 8 GB, but there are many ways the extra RAM could be useful,. Others have already mentioned CAD or VMs, AR/VR, better/faster caching, etc. I also don't doubt people will come up with new and clever ways to exploit the extra memory.
My real concern with this, though, is that in the next year or two we'll wind up with software like Windows 11, Office 2021, and the next versions of Adobe CC applications being released and requiring so much memory that 32 GB will quickly become the minimum needed for a smoothly functioning PC. It's happened over and over and I have no reason to believe things will be different this time around.
Personally, I'd love to see devs and beta testers work on 5-10 year old hardware (feel free to compile or render on a server) so they know how their stuff will behave on what "normal" users have. It'll never happen.
I might use stronger language than merely despicable. But apparently the law to get a permit in Iowa allows any local "competitors" to challenge your application on just about any grounds. The story is almost certainly up on kcrg.com (local ABC affiliate) and/or thegazette.com (their partner newspaper).
I'm not sure where exactly the line should be drawn, but almost every other country in the world spends SIGNIFICANTLY less on healthcare and has better overall outcomes *queue unsubstantiated anecdotes about long waits for emergency care*
I would think though that moving the line somewhere so that health is more important than profits...
As a small example, last night on the local news there was a story about someone trying to open a discount surgical clinic, his permit has been denied by the state at least 4 times, at least partially on grounds that if he opens it won't be profitable for the local hospitals to do that surgery any more. I wish I was kidding.
and do you realize that it's Congress which writes the legislation. My point stands.
s/Congress/lobbyists/
For the author, copyright is not temporary, and has never been. It is always life + X years.
IIRC, the original period of copyright in the US was 14 years, which was later allowed to be renewed once. It stayed that way for some time. Then the increasing lengths started. There were a few increases beyond that, I think up to about 50 years total which is probably too long but still semi-sane. Once the copyright on Steamboat Willie was about to expire, the Sonny Bono copyright act came along and extended that signifcantly, and it's been extended a couple more times since.
The Constitutional purpose of copyright is to "promote progress in the useful arts and sciences" by protecting things for a "limited time". Sadly, the courts have ruled more than once that life of the author plus 70 years counts as limited, and I wouldn't be surprised if they applied the same standard to "forever minus a day".
If I had mod points today, you'd get one. I grew up one town over, and if each kid has a separate bedroom, there's no probably about the million+ price tag; my parents' much smaller house is valued at well over $700k now. And I wonder whether Neptune is considered a "commuter town" for NYC yet.
As far as I know, that mall is still there - due to work, kids, etc. I only visit NJ where I grew up about once a year, but my parents live about 20 minutes from there. I also believe Edison's workshop is still there and is a national historic site, I know we visited it in middle school
Great, thanks for the updated info. I didn't know, but it's probably why they stopped nagging me to enable visual voicemail.
Visual voicemail solved this 10 years ago.
I've honestly never heard of "visual voicemail" until just now. You need to use an app for it? So I assume that it uses your data allowance? If the concern is that these bastards are costing you money, then how does that solve anything?
On my phone, I think the carrier pre-installed voicemail app is really visual voicemail - because if I want to listen to the voicemail, I just hold 1 to quick dial it. I used to regularly get a popup asking if I want to enable visual voicemail which I always declined and I think finally managed to make go away for good.
I'm not sure about all carriers, but be aware that Verizon charges a monthly fee for the completely automated visual voicemail "service".
Last year Zhang gave a talk where I work. Aside from (to me at least) coming off as very arrogant, he clearly made a huge point to NOT mention Doudna's work at any point during his talk.
It's been mentioned indirectly above, and I'm sure it took some trial and error before it worked, but I can't possibly see how tweaking a nearly identical system in prokaryotes to work in eurkaryotes isn't obvious to one "skilled in the art". I also find asking for "fast track" approval of the patent to be pretty sleazy since MIT/Broad almost certainly knew of the Berkeley patent filing. Of course, you also have to wonder why the first filing wasn't fast tracked.
For the highest bidder they will hold the games anywhere. The Olympics are just a scam for the uber rich to make money off of unpaid athletes hoping for stardom.
I partially agree, the Olympics overall have become incredibly commercial and care more about profit than anything else. But I disagree on two points. First, for some sports (swimming, diving, track and field/athletics to name a few), the Olympics are really their "spotlight" event and are important to the athletes - sure there are worlds every year but it's the only time they really get good media coverage. Second, the Olympics haven't "belonged" solely to unpaid athletes in a long time now. I can't remember exactly when the IOC first started allowing it except it was sometime after 1984, but most if not all sports allow professionals to compete in the Olympics. Some of whom are making 10s of millions each year.
Actually, no. He said they'd face some sort of disciple and listed (arguably from least to most punitive) a 30 day job suspension, loss of security clearance, and possibly getting fired as examples. Nowhere did he mention criminal charges.
This is a relatively huge deposit, agreed. We do waste a whole lot of helium. In fact, it may be that most of what's wasted is actually from natural gas fields not capturing the helium "byproduct".
I think you grossly understate that chilling it out of the air would be "signficantly" more expensive than recovering from ground reserves, it's far more expensive than that. A small helium recovery system for NMR/MRI instruments costs on the order of $200k installed, ignoring ongoing maintenance. We looked into one a few years back as helium prices rose - I manage 3 NMR instruments and we use ~60L/week of liquid helium keeping the cold - and the payback period for a recovery system at then current prices was on the order of 15 years again ignoring maintenance. That may be more like 12 years now. And that's for separating and reliquefying helium that's a very significant portion of the captured gas, not something that a small fraction of 1%. Economics get better as you use and recover more. I will say though that the newest large magnets come with built in reliquefaction systems - they still take several to many thousands of liters of liquid helium to cool and energize, but only require a small periodic topping up.
Pricing can be a bit tricky, but we pay ~$12/liter for liquid helium which is on the lower end of retail. One liter of liquid becomes something like 720 liters as a gas, so your per cubic meter price a couple of posts down is a bit low, it should be $15-20. A full party balloon has a negligible amount, though, if you figure 1/2 liter/balloon my one liter of liquid would fill almost 1500 of them, or about $0.01 each. I've filled a couple of dozen from one of our gas cylinders and the amount used didn't even register on the regulator.
My work password rules are set/enforced by hospital IT (I don't work in the hospital, but we unfortunately share IT). The rules are basically 10 characters minimum with 2 upper, 2 lower, 1 or 2 numbers, 1 non-alpha, no embedded dictionary words, some minimum level of difference compared to your last 10 passwords, and changed every 6 months. This is why you see things written down on sticky notes.
But how exactly is this a violation of "standard Windows conventions"? Clicking a corner [X] button has always been an indication of the user's desire to dismiss the window being closed and take no further action
Exactly, the key words being "take no further action". In other words, don't change anything on my computer...
The 'x' is expected to mean "close this window and take no action".
Close, but most users expect clicking the 'x' to mean something closer to "close this window without doing/changing anything". I know it's a relatively subtle distinction, but most users are going to expect that, by clicking the 'x', they're canceling the planned update, and somebody at MS is exploiting that. At best, it's mere incompetence and the exploit was unintended - this particular dialog really shouldn't even have an 'x' but a pair of large buttons: "Upgrade to Win10" and "Keep using Win7". More likely this setup is deceitful by design.
Microsoft says they'll give "an additional opportunity for cancelling the upgrade"
And that helps anyone who was automagically updated (whether they they wanted it or not) how, exactly?
I'm pretty sure my supervisor would prefer going back to Win7, but with the various reports I'm seeing of rollbacks leading to BSOD/reinstall, the risk of data loss is probably significantly worse than just going forward with Win10. We may have upgraded anyway before the free period expires, but we were certainly planning of a full system image/backup first which we never got to do because the OS updated itself overnight without notice.
No, it's the fault of the lazy, thoughtless bastard who didn't change the default setting to "automatically install recommended updates". I assume that wasn't the son?
FTFY
I probably shouldn't reply to ACs, but you can't necessarily cancel, especially if you never saw the notification in the first place. We had one computer here upgrade itself fully last night - walked in this morning to see "Welcome to Windows 10". Not my PC, and AFAIK it was set to automatically apply Windows updates. I spent a good part of the morning walking my supervisor through disabling most of the phone-home stuff and "acclimating" him to some of the bigger interface changes.
Exactly. My cable TV bill was going up by too much, so I went with satellite TV, except the sat provider didn't offer internet at the time. Sadly, as the only cable co. in town, my ISP decided that having internet without TV will saddle me with a $15/month surcharge. Of course, on the record they spin that as me losing a $15/month discount. Now that my contract on the sat TV (which has also gone up) is just about finished, I'm not quite sure what we're going to do.
It looks pretty good for the money.
Maybe. But while it will probably get me labeled a blasphemer and heretic on /., I just RTFA (ok, skimmed really). The very next paragraphs starts out by saying the "base model" - i.e. the one with the $500 price tag - will very likely have lower specs, they specifically mention 1920x1080, 4 GB or 8 GB RAM, and probably a lesser CPU. It also mentions that this thing has a whopping 32 GB of storage, presumably flash memory, nor any way to add any other than USB-C.