A mere billion dollars a year gets you 2000 of them. Or, with that short orbital life, 500 on-the-job sky at any time. But they'd only be useful on Arras where it's not cloudy a lot. No using them to spy on Seattle.
The solar system's not, compared to the spaces between stars.
If there are 100,000X more planets than stars, the volume of between us and the nearest stars ought to have about 100,000 planets in it. The nearest stars are 4-8 light years out. Say that figure of 4 light years defines a rough boundary of space with typical star and planet distribution for our part of the galaxy. (Yeah, that might be a stretch.) So a sphere about light years on a side should have something in the neighborhood of 100,000 planets in it.
The solar system is only about 10 light hours across. It has a volume about 700 million times smaller than the 8-light-year sphere that the theory says ought to have 100,000 planets. But if the distribution of planets were *uniform*, there would only be a 1 in 7000 chance of it having any planets in it at all. So it has 56000 times the average number of planets.
The standard explanation for this is that the planets and moons of the solar system formed where they are, out of the same cloud of junk that made up the sun. they had too much orbital velocity to get pulled into the sun and not enough to escape it, so we find them in orbit. There are pockets of extra-dense space where objects are bound in orbit. Some of them have stars in the middle. Others probably have big planets in the middle of them and are much smaller.
And we always thought of space between suns having no planets in it. But this estimate says there are a lot of them, only hard to find because they're dim and cold and dark and far away.
But once every 7000 years or so, one or more of those wanderers might wander through our solar system. That would be something to see.
No, but they could drop prices by 25% without changing their spending AT ALL.
Marketing BRINGS IN MONEY or they wouldn't bother doing it. Marketing has an immediate (this quarter) effect on sales. R&D has very little immediate effect on sales. It's for the longer term. If you stop spending R&D money, your sales cruise along fine... for a while. Then they begin to drop off because you have no new, premium product to sell, only the same-old-same-old that's gone generic and has thus become a commodity. Like aspirin.
The fact that they spend 9 billion a year on sales and marketing means that sales and marketing increase their top line by more than 9 billion a year, which is 25% of their take. R&D may provide, by my SWAG, as much as 6 billion, but certainly a lot less than the snake oil guys.
1) Hardest course loads through college (excepting perhaps hard sciences and premeds).
I used to think that until I took an upper-division history course. KICKED * MY * ASS
Engineers are used to reading a little, understanding a few conceptually relatively simple concepts and then exploring the complex and myriad ways those concepts can be applied to solve practical problems.
Liberal arts students are used to reading or skimming massive volumes of written material, sometimes densely packed with information, sensing the overall tone, organizing the information into a structure that allows some reasonable fraction of it to be remembered, and showing up for class and exams ready to discuss or write about it in convincing detail.
2) No girls in classes (5-14%, falls as engineering major gets harder (ie electrical))
But if you're one of those girls, you have your pick of the boys on campus who are most likely to amount to something.
That's because of where the manufacturing jobs have gone. Technical jobs go where industry goes, because most technology is in the service of industry.
The original article says Google may not have the tools to force the phone to unlock.
That's extremely unlikely. And if it's true, it's inexplicable. What company wouldn't build a foolproof mechanism to unlock its operating system if it gets into a bad state?
This guy is my new hero, even though he later backed down and said he wasn't going to use it anymore. I for one am fed up with the constant assault of cell phone conversations from people who have no idea how to be considerate to those around them.
Yeah, it's just wonderful that there are narcissistic bastards out there who will interfere with others' right to communicate and may compromise public safety because it inconveniences them just a little bit.
They go find (or define or outright invent) diseases and syndromes to treat with their new drugs. That's part of the Research in Research and Development budgets. But maybe it should be counted as Sales expeditures. Even if the drug is for a real medical problem, sometimes the drugs that pharma rolls out don't really treat it.
Who ever heard of Restless Leg Syndrome before there was Miraplex? Where was "osteopenia" before Boniva was introduced to treat it and incidentally cause the diseases it is alleged to prevent? What exactly is "statin deficiency" other than wholly asymptomatic? If a drug doesn't work for you, you're now a "treatment-resistant" patient (somehow it's your fault!) who should continue taking the drug that doesn't work in conjunction with another drug that likely won't work either. Why are people inhaling asthma treatments that make them die of athsma and taking pain relievers that cause heart failure? And maybe you don't have a disease with specific symptoms. Maybe you have a "spectrum disorder" of some kind. You generally don't feel all that great and we have just the drug for that.
Sending drug reps to persuade doctors to prescribe your expensive drug still ain't R&D.
Let's put this in perspective:
From Bayer's 2011 Annual Report (millions of Euros) Net sales 36,528 Cost of goods sold (17,975) Gross profit 18,553 Selling expenses (8,958) Research and development expenses (2,932) General administration expenses (1,713) Other operating income 859 Other operating expenses (1,660) Operating result (EBIT) 4,149
That's right. Bayer spent 3x as much on marketing as on R&D. Marketing was their biggest expense category, after COGS, by a wide margin. In contrast, R&D is only 8% of their net sales.
But all of the marketing is related to new drug introduction. They could cut their research and it would directly increase their profit. But it would also put them in a situation where they'd lose sales of new drugs in a few years. The fact that their managers believe it's in their best interest to spend 2.9B per year on R&D implies that they make considerably more than that per year on patented drugs. Maybe 6B/year. Maybe more.
Now let's get back to India. How many people in India do you think could have shelled out $5500 a month for a cancer drug -- even if it is life-saving? The per-capita GDP in India is only about $1500/year. Bayer can't be making a lot of sales on a drug that people simply can't afford to buy.
They supposedly can make it locally for $175 per months' supply. This will results in a lot more sales, and India's apparently going to have a forced-licensing arrangement whereby Bayer will still get some money. Just not 97% profit. But 6% of the net sales on a drug that Indians WILL be able to buy may bring in more revenue than 97% on the Bayer-branded drug that Indian's WON'T be able to buy.
I expect Bayer will complain for a while then quietly pocket the royalties and maybe in a couple years they'll figure out that they can make more money by licensing their patented drugs in poor countries than they can by selling them at the same prices they'd stick to USAnians.
That's just idiocy. There's a wide margin between "I'm pretty sure you did X" and "I'm sure that I can prove beyond a reasonable doubt to a jury based only on the evidence that's admissible in court according to the rules of criminal evidence that you did X."
Prosecutors are people. Like everybody else they are overconfident in their beliefs even when they take the knowledge that they are probably overconfident in the beliefs into account. So when I say they are pretty sure, I mean they think they know you did it. But based on their knowledge of the rules of evidence and experience with trying cases they are not as sure that they can prove it to a jury. So they (usually) believe they are doing the right thing when they try to bully you into pleading. And in most cases the person they are bullying really is the criminal the prosecutor believes him to be.
In a minority of cases, the prosecutor is just wrong and the perpetrator is not in the room.
And for the record, I'm not a prosecutor... but I'd like to throw your ass in jail just because. That's why I'm not fit to be a prosecutor.
The unspoken assumption there is that you were going to lose the criminal case, so they money and time you'd spend on the jury trial would be wasted.
That's not always the case. In some unknown but probably large fraction of cases, the DA not only wants to bypass the trial because it saves him money and effort, but he also doesn't have enough evidence to assure a conviction. He's pretty sure you did it -- enough to put your ass in jail --- but not so sure he can meet the standards of proof that a jury trial would require. So he tries to frighten and bully you into going to prison.
To assess whether this is a good idea, you need a good lawyer and you need to tell him or her all about the evidence that the state has -- and might have -- against you. Then the attorney can make something of an informed assessment of:
1. What it is the state will likely charge you with -- you can't believe the DA -- he's trying to bully you. 2. How likely it is, given what you know about the evidence, that the state can prove its case in court. You can always reassess after discovery. 3. The range of likely sentences you would get if convicted on each count. 4. How much of your money and time this is likely to eat up assuming a vigorous defense.
And there's a tactic you can sometimes use in your favor. Some cases are complicated and could take a long time to prepare. Or they could be in busy offices and get lower priority than higher-profile or more serious cases. In that case, you may have an advantage by demanding a *speedy* trial. It's your right. That means either the state has to put aside other cases to prepare yours for trial sooner or it has to go ahead with a case that's less fully prepared and your chance of acquittal may be improved.
Now I feel guilty. I may have helped douchebags get off.
No kidding? You DO WORK and ENERGY IS RELEASED? Is anybody surprised to see that Landauer was right? Nobody?
What's surprising is that somebody bothered to verify a result that's obvious to everybody with a basic understanding of physics. If the claim weren't true, the machinery that they used to perform the experiment wouldn't have worked either.
Slashdot Mirror
A mere billion dollars a year gets you 2000 of them. Or, with that short orbital life, 500 on-the-job sky at any time. But they'd only be useful on Arras where it's not cloudy a lot. No using them to spy on Seattle.
It could if they launched them with a big batch on each rocket, the way unis do with cubesats.
Writing always comes after agriculture. People who don't farm don't have a need to write.
Wow, I thought they were talking about a new species, but it turns out they're talking about old ones.
The mix of characteristics suggests that they might have been a distinct species, but may be just a mixed ancestry of barely premodern human types.
The solar system's not, compared to the spaces between stars.
If there are 100,000X more planets than stars, the volume of between us and the nearest stars ought to have about 100,000 planets in it. The nearest stars are 4-8 light years out. Say that figure of 4 light years defines a rough boundary of space with typical star and planet distribution for our part of the galaxy. (Yeah, that might be a stretch.) So a sphere about light years on a side should have something in the neighborhood of 100,000 planets in it.
The solar system is only about 10 light hours across. It has a volume about 700 million times smaller than the 8-light-year sphere that the theory says ought to have 100,000 planets. But if the distribution of planets were *uniform*, there would only be a 1 in 7000 chance of it having any planets in it at all. So it has 56000 times the average number of planets.
The standard explanation for this is that the planets and moons of the solar system formed where they are, out of the same cloud of junk that made up the sun. they had too much orbital velocity to get pulled into the sun and not enough to escape it, so we find them in orbit. There are pockets of extra-dense space where objects are bound in orbit. Some of them have stars in the middle. Others probably have big planets in the middle of them and are much smaller.
And we always thought of space between suns having no planets in it. But this estimate says there are a lot of them, only hard to find because they're dim and cold and dark and far away.
But once every 7000 years or so, one or more of those wanderers might wander through our solar system. That would be something to see.
No, but they could drop prices by 25% without changing their spending AT ALL.
Marketing BRINGS IN MONEY or they wouldn't bother doing it. Marketing has an immediate (this quarter) effect on sales. R&D has very little immediate effect on sales. It's for the longer term. If you stop spending R&D money, your sales cruise along fine... for a while. Then they begin to drop off because you have no new, premium product to sell, only the same-old-same-old that's gone generic and has thus become a commodity. Like aspirin.
The fact that they spend 9 billion a year on sales and marketing means that sales and marketing increase their top line by more than 9 billion a year, which is 25% of their take. R&D may provide, by my SWAG, as much as 6 billion, but certainly a lot less than the snake oil guys.
Why study engineering?
1) Hardest course loads through college (excepting perhaps hard sciences and premeds).
I used to think that until I took an upper-division history course. KICKED * MY * ASS
Engineers are used to reading a little, understanding a few conceptually relatively simple concepts and then exploring the complex and myriad ways those concepts can be applied to solve practical problems.
Liberal arts students are used to reading or skimming massive volumes of written material, sometimes densely packed with information, sensing the overall tone, organizing the information into a structure that allows some reasonable fraction of it to be remembered, and showing up for class and exams ready to discuss or write about it in convincing detail.
2) No girls in classes (5-14%, falls as engineering major gets harder (ie electrical))
But if you're one of those girls, you have your pick of the boys on campus who are most likely to amount to something.
That's because of where the manufacturing jobs have gone. Technical jobs go where industry goes, because most technology is in the service of industry.
The original article says Google may not have the tools to force the phone to unlock.
That's extremely unlikely. And if it's true, it's inexplicable. What company wouldn't build a foolproof mechanism to unlock its operating system if it gets into a bad state?
No, the story says the phone in question is a seized phone. It's evidence in their possession. They just can't read it.
Well the police does hold a PhD.....
Only in a cell.
This guy is my new hero, even though he later backed down and said he wasn't going to use it anymore. I for one am fed up with the constant assault of cell phone conversations from people who have no idea how to be considerate to those around them.
Yeah, it's just wonderful that there are narcissistic bastards out there who will interfere with others' right to communicate and may compromise public safety because it inconveniences them just a little bit.
They go find (or define or outright invent) diseases and syndromes to treat with their new drugs. That's part of the Research in Research and Development budgets. But maybe it should be counted as Sales expeditures. Even if the drug is for a real medical problem, sometimes the drugs that pharma rolls out don't really treat it.
Who ever heard of Restless Leg Syndrome before there was Miraplex?
Where was "osteopenia" before Boniva was introduced to treat it and incidentally cause the diseases it is alleged to prevent?
What exactly is "statin deficiency" other than wholly asymptomatic?
If a drug doesn't work for you, you're now a "treatment-resistant" patient (somehow it's your fault!) who should continue taking the drug that doesn't work in conjunction with another drug that likely won't work either.
Why are people inhaling asthma treatments that make them die of athsma and taking pain relievers that cause heart failure?
And maybe you don't have a disease with specific symptoms. Maybe you have a "spectrum disorder" of some kind. You generally don't feel all that great and we have just the drug for that.
Sending drug reps to persuade doctors to prescribe your expensive drug still ain't R&D.
Let's put this in perspective:
From Bayer's 2011 Annual Report
(millions of Euros)
Net sales 36,528
Cost of goods sold (17,975)
Gross profit 18,553
Selling expenses (8,958)
Research and development expenses (2,932)
General administration expenses (1,713)
Other operating income 859
Other operating expenses (1,660)
Operating result (EBIT) 4,149
That's right. Bayer spent 3x as much on marketing as on R&D. Marketing was their biggest expense category, after COGS, by a wide margin.
In contrast, R&D is only 8% of their net sales.
But all of the marketing is related to new drug introduction. They could cut their research and it would directly increase their profit. But it would also put them in a situation where they'd lose sales of new drugs in a few years. The fact that their managers believe it's in their best interest to spend 2.9B per year on R&D implies that they make considerably more than that per year on patented drugs. Maybe 6B/year. Maybe more.
Now let's get back to India. How many people in India do you think could have shelled out $5500 a month for a cancer drug -- even if it is life-saving? The per-capita GDP in India is only about $1500/year. Bayer can't be making a lot of sales on a drug that people simply can't afford to buy.
They supposedly can make it locally for $175 per months' supply. This will results in a lot more sales, and India's apparently going to have a forced-licensing arrangement whereby Bayer will still get some money. Just not 97% profit. But 6% of the net sales on a drug that Indians WILL be able to buy may bring in more revenue than 97% on the Bayer-branded drug that Indian's WON'T be able to buy.
I expect Bayer will complain for a while then quietly pocket the royalties and maybe in a couple years they'll figure out that they can make more money by licensing their patented drugs in poor countries than they can by selling them at the same prices they'd stick to USAnians.
That's just idiocy. There's a wide margin between "I'm pretty sure you did X" and "I'm sure that I can prove beyond a reasonable doubt to a jury based only on the evidence that's admissible in court according to the rules of criminal evidence that you did X."
Prosecutors are people. Like everybody else they are overconfident in their beliefs even when they take the knowledge that they are probably overconfident in the beliefs into account. So when I say they are pretty sure, I mean they think they know you did it. But based on their knowledge of the rules of evidence and experience with trying cases they are not as sure that they can prove it to a jury. So they (usually) believe they are doing the right thing when they try to bully you into pleading. And in most cases the person they are bullying really is the criminal the prosecutor believes him to be.
In a minority of cases, the prosecutor is just wrong and the perpetrator is not in the room.
And for the record, I'm not a prosecutor... but I'd like to throw your ass in jail just because. That's why I'm not fit to be a prosecutor.
Seem too low. The solar system contains only 8.2 planets. Why are so many planets in such a small volume of space?
The unspoken assumption there is that you were going to lose the criminal case, so they money and time you'd spend on the jury trial would be wasted.
That's not always the case. In some unknown but probably large fraction of cases, the DA not only wants to bypass the trial because it saves him money and effort, but he also doesn't have enough evidence to assure a conviction. He's pretty sure you did it -- enough to put your ass in jail --- but not so sure he can meet the standards of proof that a jury trial would require. So he tries to frighten and bully you into going to prison.
To assess whether this is a good idea, you need a good lawyer and you need to tell him or her all about the evidence that the state has -- and might have -- against you. Then the attorney can make something of an informed assessment of:
1. What it is the state will likely charge you with -- you can't believe the DA -- he's trying to bully you.
2. How likely it is, given what you know about the evidence, that the state can prove its case in court. You can always reassess after discovery.
3. The range of likely sentences you would get if convicted on each count.
4. How much of your money and time this is likely to eat up assuming a vigorous defense.
And there's a tactic you can sometimes use in your favor. Some cases are complicated and could take a long time to prepare. Or they could be in busy offices and get lower priority than higher-profile or more serious cases. In that case, you may have an advantage by demanding a *speedy* trial. It's your right. That means either the state has to put aside other cases to prepare yours for trial sooner or it has to go ahead with a case that's less fully prepared and your chance of acquittal may be improved.
Now I feel guilty. I may have helped douchebags get off.
HOW. did that get modded insightful?
No evidence.
No explanation of why you "think" that.
If that's what passes for insight on slashdot, I think the problem may be that people are just not engaged enough to think about education.
Except that OWS and TEA are Democratic and Republican (respectively) astroturfing projects.
And you're mistaken. Both Democrats and Republicans agree on most things, but they only talk about the stuff they don't agree about.
Research indicates that the fraction of people how reject everything that conflicts with their ideology is frighteningly close to 100%.
Imagine how much this would add to the congestion of busy areas if everybody did it.
No kidding? You DO WORK and ENERGY IS RELEASED? Is anybody surprised to see that Landauer was right? Nobody?
What's surprising is that somebody bothered to verify a result that's obvious to everybody with a basic understanding of physics. If the claim weren't true, the machinery that they used to perform the experiment wouldn't have worked either.
Science publishing is not what it used to be.
I think the "fence" refers to the structure of the transmitting antennas.
Fine for you. His stated purpose in making it open-sourced is to get free help.
I am not an advocate in providing or asking for work that has commercial value for free.
The CAR is legal. Operation on public roads by anything other than a licensed driver is NOT legal.