Actually, Saudi Arabia jacked up production in 2015 to attempt to bankrupt the US shale producers to attempt avoid the current situation where the US has enough market share to remove OPEC's supply-side fine controls over the market. The US won the battle and is now the effective world-wide oil "swing" producer able to set caps on future prices as OPEC has been reduced to less than 50% of the world-wide oil supply contracts.
FWIW,Obama and the "liberals" had actually wanted to permanently cripple the US shale production, they could have attempted to capitalize on this event to make it impossible for the US shale producers to recover by imposing restrictions, but of course they wanted the economy in decent shape for the 2016 election, so they chose to sit on their hands... They chose the result of the 2016 election over the local environment, something to consider....
No, despite all the media noise out there and spilled ink, the Republicans and Democrats aren't actually very far apart on US energy policy. Also, despite all the media posturing, the Paris accords are basically a "voluntary goal" (of about 2deg C), no actual hard limits. The only thing of consequence about them is the $100B slush fund for clean energy projects in 3rd world countries. Sure it was all that could be agreed to, but it's kind of a bad joke, really. The only real argument for staying in them is that it "looks" good to not pull out.
FWIW as you noted, the cones in our eyes have "band-pass" filters in order form them so to accurate receive colors is not really that important the for the RGB spectra of the pixels match the LMS (long medium short) band-pass filters of the cones in your eye, only that the relative response is maintained.
Having said that the way you sense colors is not at all how your eye receives the stimulus from the cones in your eyes. First of all, the colors are not sensed as relative responses, but opponent color responses: L-M (aka R-G), L+M-S (aka Y-B) and intensity. This makes for some interesting colors that are not sensed (e.g., reddish-green and yellowish-blue) and even some "impossible" colors. This amplifies any mismatch in your "filters" so unless they are *exact*, you will sense the difference.
Fortunately (unfortunately?) the way we perceive colors is different than the way we sense colors. Your brain is really painting the colors for your perception in your visual cortex after it's done some "white-balancing" too so what color you remember is a significantly influence by your setting and context. Remember the blue/black dress that broke the internet (or was it gold)?
Long story short, what you think of as perceiving color is really only "hinted" at by the cone response in your eyes. Any ability to distinguish "shades" of color is really a contrast response, not a color frequency response.
Back to this new technology, of course if you are a "traditionalist" and still believe in absolute color and frequency responses and gamuts, probably won't like this new technology at all given these pathetic gamut tracings, but if you follow a bit down the rabbit hole of your visual cortex, and look at what was once possible with Kinemacolor a (simple two-color) processes and realize that what most people think of as color, really isn't how you perceive color at all, it is really all in your head.
> My grandpa sold his (ironically chinese) restaurant just after the I-80 bypass was completed in the mid '70s. The town has never been the same since.
Trump will get a Chinese restaurant to open and that will Make Rawlins Great Again (tm).
I imagine the biggest employer is a welfare check.
Unemployment in Rawlins is about 5% (not that there are many people there 10,000). It's not like there are unemployed coal miners hanging around Rawlins picking up welfare pining for the mines to reopen. Coal hasn't been a factor in Rawlins employment for many decades (maybe even since around 1900, all the active coal mining you hear about in northern Wyoming around Gillette, not Rawlins in the south). You aren't retraining those Rawlins coal mining folks, they are long gone...
The big employers in Rawlins (Railroad, Refinery, Penitentiary) all pay pretty good. Maybe if you are working at Tacohell or the new Walmart that just opened up you might be on welfare (as you would be in any part of the USA). Generally if you are of working age and don't work for Railroad, Refinery, or Penitentiary, you probably either started working for Uranium mining companies, or the various wind farms that have sprung up (but even the largest of them, CCSM, only has about ~100 non-construction jobs), or like most, left town for the Dakotas to work on fracking projects about 10 years ago. Unless you really enjoy hunting and fishing. There's really no reason to stay in Rawlins unless you like hunting and fishing (unless you somehow enjoy gusting winds all the time).
This article seems to imply that layed-off coal miners from Gillette will move down to Rawlins to work on windfarms and is trying to entice them with training. All that might do is trigger another mini-boomlet in Rawlins (like the mini Uranium boomlet). I suspect many of these folks from Gillette will migrate to fracking projects in the Dakotas instead or move into more transient energy-construction jobs (like making the wind farm, not operating it), but we shall see...
Actually over the last few years there's been a mini boom in Rawlins (the county seat of Carbon County), Wyoming. The boom wasn't coal (that's been long gone except for some small coal liquification projects), but in Uranium mining in neighboring Sweetwater County. I guess retraining uranium miners doesn't have the same "green" backstory that the press wants to write about.
It's *really* windy there all the time, so back in 2001, one company built a windfarm in nearby Medicine Bow (111MW farm), and there are many more under construction in the area. I wonder if this Chinese company simply can't find enough workers in the area and wants to train some.
FWIW, my family has been in Rawlins since the '50s and really there are only 3 big employers in the area: Railroad, Sinclair refinery, and the State Penitentiary. Rawlins used to be a big stop on US highway 30, but when they built the I-80 bypass, the town died (kind of like in the fictional movie Cars, Radiator Springs used to be a big stop on US highway 66, but when they built the I-40 bypass, the town died). My grandpa sold his (ironically chinese) restaurant just after the I-80 bypass was completed in the mid '70s. The town has never been the same since.
There are a wide range of commercial drones that shockingly are not armed with military munitions. Technically, those $10 quad-copter remote controlled toys you can buy at a mall kiosk are drones.
I suppose the govt doesn't want to be sued every time a police dept decides to take one down because it is harassing someone and keep an FOIA subpoena-able record of this...
You do REALIZE that Crimea was apart of Russia before the United States was even a country? Or do they not teach you idiots history?
As I recall Crimea was *apart* from Russia until Catherine the Great defeated the Ottoman Empire in 1783. Although the constitution of the US wasn't adopted until 1789, I think USA was technically a country between 1776 and 1789...
Although the Russians managed to keep Crimea after the Crimean war (1856), as an indirect consequence of that war, the Russia ended up selling Alaska to the USA. This was part of a bizarre time when US and Russia actually were allies. During the US civil war (1861-1865), Britain was the meddling country trying to destabilize the Union government and Russia was one of our only friends. Russia had just liberated their serfs following the Crimean War aligning themselves with the Union release of the southern slaves and Russian diplomats gave Lincoln a heads up about a French-UK plan to enter the war on the side of the Confederacy and forcing the Union to recognize the Confederacy as a nation. Somehow we kept that relationship with Russia up until WWI.
I suspect that may be the answer. Lots of chemicals sold by international companies specializing in chemicals (e.g., Fisher, Baker) have switched their raw suppliers from Western sources to China. As we all know, you have to ride herd constantly on Chinese suppliers because they will take any shortcut they can to save money.
It wouldn't surprise me if the latest batches failed QC testing here in the States even after supposedly passing QA at their source. Even more fun, if FDA inspectors found problems anywhere in the supply chain it may take a while to remedy. With only two end product suppliers problems at one can cause a shortage very fast.
FWIW, in an email, a spokesman said the shortage is due to issues with a third-party supplier but not the API supplier. (API means active pharmaceutical ingredient), so it isn't likely to be the actual soda ash / bicarbonate supplier that is the issue per se, but perhaps some other company that supplies testing materials, or perhaps some packaging supplier. As I mentioned the USA is one of the largest suppliers of sodium bicarbonate, it seems unlikely that there is a simply sourcing problem with the basic ingredient and not something fixed by going to China.
I would suggest going to another country, but apparently it's illegal to import medicine (for Americans).
The top producers and consumers of sodium bicarbonate are China and the USA. Europe is the next largest and they consume nearly all of their own production. I'm not so sure that many would want to follow your suggestion of importing pharma grade sodium bicarbonate from China...
Not exactly. Both food grade and pharma grade sodium bicarbonate are greater than 99% "pure". Many industrial producers make both food and pharma grade sodium bicarbonate, some of them on the same line and processed to the same purity level...
The difference is that Pharma grade sodium bicarbonate is specifically tested to assure very small levels of certain specific impurities** mostly to minimize potential issues with inconvenient formation of various precipitates and other complications in equipment (e.g., hemodialysis), or your body.
All that product testing/certification isn't cheap and is completely unnecessary if you are simply eating it. For example, if 0.05% of the impurity was NaCl or MgCl, that would *bad* in your blood, but if you ate the typical amount of bicarbonate, you wouldn't even notice that impurity.
**USP has specific tests for impurities such as Chloride (0.015%), Sulfur (0.015%), Aluminium (2ug/g), Arsenic (2ppm), Calcium (0.01%), Magnesium (0.004%), Copper (1ppm). Iron (5ppm), Ammonia (20ppm), Organics (0.01%), etc...
Science is facing a raft of politically-motivated studies, rigged or suppressed medical trials, false or irreproducible results are rampant. But the big problem is "lack of diversity"??
I would think if you demanded rigor and accountability for the actual science part of the job, you wouldn't have to worry too much about who was doing the work.
Of all the places SJW types should stay the hell out of, aside from politics, its science.
If this was any other endeavor, people would be talking about a boycott... Apparently science is deemed important enough not to boycott of organizations that didn't tow the PC line. Maybe there is hope for rationality after all (or did I speak too soon)...
This book took the history of three-act blockbuster movies and distilled movie making into a minute-to-minute movie formula (a beat sheet) for future amateur screen writers. Apparently, the author died in 2009 (the book was published in 2005) so he probably didn't know how bad it would become and can't even repent...
Yes, and every single detected photon in the universe is a counterfactual to all the other paths the photon could have taken. Normally, these paths are numerous and unknowable, but if you build a machine just right, you can restrict the paths so much that there are just a few, and witnessing one path can eliminate some others as possibilities, and also prove the existence of a separate but coherent path.
Although restricting the paths is one way to do this (with the quantum bomb detector), I believe the proposed quantum counterfactual communicaton technique actually uses the Quantum Zeno Effect. Instead of restricting the paths of a photon, the Quantum Zeno effect restricts the time-evolution of the photon temporarily preventing quantum decoherence.
Basically a watched pot never boils on (quantum) steroids.
You are misunderstanding quantum counterfactual communications.
Quantum counterfactual communications uses the principle of interaction-free measurement. Although the information was phase encoded in photons, the information is transmitted in photons that are not actually sent to the receiver. Strangely (and this is hard to understand) photons are sent with some probability to the receiver, so it's possible that the receiver receives some photons, but those photons actually sent don't actually encode the information, but the information is conveyed by the photons that don't actually get sent. That way any photons that incidentally get sent can be "observed" without consequence of wave function collapse of the information.
One interesting multi-verse interpretation of the multi-path bomb detectors is that in the universes where the photon took the path where the bomb went off aren't our universe, so we get to experience the consequence of the photon taking the other path. Similarly in this quantum counterfactual communication, we get to experience the consequences of the photons that were not transmitted.
The group intends to create a "shadow security council," or an expert group capable of providing advice to world leaders on nuclear matters...
SO to counter all the other shadow governments organizations that swarm around giving bad advice to the elected government officials, they've decided to make yet-another shadow government. GLWT.
I suspect these people are mad they can't manipulate elections their way anymore, they've decided to take their toys back and play amongst themselves. I'm gonna take my clock and go home!
Myself I have always mourned that Motorola never could increase the frequency of the MC680x0 beyond 66Mhz and keep up with Intel because that architecture was a real beauty to program in assembler.
Historically that's one of the things that always boggled my mind, Intel's instruction set had no protected mode until quite late, so programmers had to do some interesting things that often resulted in problems and the computer crashing anyway (IE Windows BSOD) or had to rely on a single-tasker operating system where it didn't matter so much; Motorola's chips had Supervisor Mode that was a protected mode, but Apple chose to ignore its existence when writing "System"/MacOS, where running multiple simultaneous applications in a GUI it would have been highly beneficial.
Just never understood that, especially when Apple had left the CLI world even before they completely dropped the Apple II line.
Supervisor mode in 68k was pretty much just an alt-stack pointer. Virtual memory support and similar protections was a function of the peripheral chips used in the system back in those days (not really highly integrated). The peripheral chip chosen by apple for the mac didn't support virtual memory and without such memory protection it probably wasn't worth the effort. Also you couldn't really run more than one program at a time anyhow.
By the time switcher and multi-finder features were added to finder, the shortcomings of this were obvious, but w/o virtual memory, it's hard to fix. SW constructs like handles instead of pointers patched over the situation (the same technique was used in Windows and other contemporary OSs to cover up for their lack of VM).
It wasn't until OSX where virtual memory was fully supported and that was much much later...
And lest we leave out the "post office", please read this wiki entry on the Thurn-und-Taxis Post. This was a private company. Nearly all german states still continued to contract with this company to handle postal service after they were finally given the right to create their own postal service. Eventually this was nationalized by Prussia as well.
In contrast, in the USA, the postal service has been a government monopoly from the get-go.
I think people's general observation about the government owning everything in Europe somehow also assumes it started that way, which is far from the historical record. In fact, historically, it has often been the case that either private enterprises make the first move and government later nationalizing these endeavors OR "royal" governments handing a lucrative contract to some "nobelmen" who enrich themselves by spending public monopoly money in the name of the state to build their own private dynasty (eventually morphing into companies and getting nationalized as post-royal European governments gained political power and money).
By the way, the latter is happen in contemporary china ("nobelmen" in communist china were military and politburo folks) and is making some people really really rich (like their european dynasty prototypes)...
But the government "technically" owns it all either way...
Sigh... I think people need to study history more.
Let's just take German railway history as an example. Please google the Deil Valley Railway Company (one of the first joint stock companies in Germany). It wasn't until later that railway operation like these were taken over by the Bergisch-Markisch Railway Company and only later these private enterprises were nationalized by the the Prussian State Railway.
Nearly all the other public works in Europe have a similar history, sure they belong to the government, but that's either because they contracted a company to do it, or bought out (or nationalized) that company later.
Call me a communist if you need to, but I'd rather not see something as important in humanity's future as space exploration in *exckusively* private hands.
Just look at how well privately owned essential infrastructure works out for the masses all over the world so far, e.g. with internet, mobile phones, water, public transportation, health...
Some perspective: 3.5 billion is less than the military spending of the USA in one single day. Less than even the *increase* in budget from 2016 to 2017, by more than an order of magnitude.
Okay, I'll call you a communist. Historically, it's been the case with nearly all "public" infrastructure outside of communist countries that private companies, plan it, design it, organize short-term financing for it, build it, maintain it. Of course with public infrastructure, the government is there to consult, kibitz, cajole, zone, and regulate it, and inevitably foots most of the bill, but of course owns the artifact at the end of the day.
Often as an incentive to reduce public outlays, concessions are offered to the public companies to reduce the actual net present cost to the public for the infrastructure. E.g., build a dock or railroad and you get this adjacent land for development, design a spacecraft for us and you can take the technology to build rockets for private launches, etc, etc...
Eventually, these *concessions* to private companies can form the seed for whole new private enterprise that accelerate the economy of a country. Call me an evil capitalist, but that's the way it works... the even the socialist (pseudo-communist USSR and China) world...
How does this work in your theoretical communist world?
The whole idea that Silicon Valley VCs are somehow *looking* for unicorn companies or unicorn ideas is totally ass-backward.
Silicon Valley VCs believe they can *create* unicorns by throwing money at them. They aren't looking for them per-se. They are looking for the "right team", the "right investment", etc... The actual idea? Maybe a company can pivot to an idea before the iron grows cold and they are off to the next team. Or not.
A billion dollar valuation (aka unicorn) simply means VCs have managed to get some 3rd or 4th round chumps to dump a bunch of money into a company for a microscopic share of equity. The smart investors either came in early, or have financing structures with warrants that are dilutive (meaning they didn't actually invest at unicorn levels) unlike the employees that usually promised fully diluted shares some day. The whole fiction of unicorns is simply a media creation and has nothing to do with the market potential of a company. Like Enron or Adelphia accounting, it's a fiction that only has to do with the esoteric machinations of valuation and financing a startup.
I suspect the main reason nobody is pivoting towards medicaid recipients is that silicon valley companies probably don't think they can compete with the fraud levels that are out there. If some SV company thought they figured out a way to skim medicaid dollars, they probably can't hold a candle to what people are already doing to the system. It's hard to beat scammers at their own game (esp if you are trying to play fair). On the other hand, maybe a Uber-like company might want to tackle this, but I don't know if that would be a good thing.
The Ptolemaic model was not science, it was a complex mathematical model built to shoehorn in a whole pack of observations into a much older geocentric view of the universe. It sure the heck wasn't science
Well, the history of science has been filled with shoehorning.
The "science" that preceded relativity started as a complex mathematical model built to shoehorn in a whole pack of observations into a much older non-relativistic (aether) view of the universe.
The "science" that preceded quantum mechanics started as a complex mathematical model built to shoehorn in a whole pack of observation into a much older non-quantum (deterministic) view of the universe.
It often takes quite a while for views of our universe to change and not everyone goes along quietly. Simply dismissing the stuff that came before as "sure the heck wasn't science" doesn't really honor the scientific method at all. We'd be pretty arrogant to think that 100 years from now, all the "science" we have come up with today won't be looked at with derision and dismissiveness.
Even Einstein (who came up with relativity and won a Nobel prize for the quantum mechanical photo-electric effect) spent years trying to dismiss the currently accepted quantum view of the universe (the probabilistic view, aka god does not play dice) and many think never fully accepted it. I don't think he's the only one either...
Even if only 2.21% of Indian new college graduates made the highest grade, Indian universities graduate about 1 Million engineers every year. In contrast, in the USA, we get about 100k engineering graduates every year and 100% of them don't make the highest grade.
On the other hand, this company Aspiring Minds has a specific agenda...
However, the need of the hour is to find these pockets and scale them up to make an exponential impact on employability. This is crucial for India to continue its growth story and achieve the vision of India becoming the human resource provider for the whole world.
Interesting to note that one of the sales pitches they use to sell this testing product seems to be bringing up the spectre of a shortage of Indian talent causing salaries for talent growing out of control decreasing the advantage India might have in this area.
Although I understand the Indian culture seems to worshiping testing, but if I were and engineer asked to sit for this, I think I would simply just be offended by such a company. Not just because of the fact that they are trying to create a test whose end goal is to keep salaries down, but also by the audacity of a company to think that a computerized test could substitute for employment screening and job aptitude.
Then again maybe I have options. If I didn't I might just suck it in and take the test. After all, Einstein when his back was against the wall and no professorship was forthcoming, signed up to be a Patent clerk. Compared to him, in a pinch I probably should be happy with a job as a Walmart greeter, so taking this godforsaken test wouldn't be the worst thing in the world.
We won't have access to the source code to GPL it. The BSD code will be modified and re-licensed as proprietary before it ever reaches us.
But I already have the code and am building it right now.
Just because you *have* the code, doesn't mean you can GPL the code. The author is the only one that has that right (because they own the copyrights) unless they delegate those rights to someone else (like is common practice in the linux kernel). Did the authors of fuchsia (presumably folks @google) delegate the rights to you or the FSF? or is your intention to simply steal it and stick a GPL on it.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, Saudi Arabia jacked up production in 2015 to attempt to bankrupt the US shale producers to attempt avoid the current situation where the US has enough market share to remove OPEC's supply-side fine controls over the market. The US won the battle and is now the effective world-wide oil "swing" producer able to set caps on future prices as OPEC has been reduced to less than 50% of the world-wide oil supply contracts.
FWIW,Obama and the "liberals" had actually wanted to permanently cripple the US shale production, they could have attempted to capitalize on this event to make it impossible for the US shale producers to recover by imposing restrictions, but of course they wanted the economy in decent shape for the 2016 election, so they chose to sit on their hands... They chose the result of the 2016 election over the local environment, something to consider....
No, despite all the media noise out there and spilled ink, the Republicans and Democrats aren't actually very far apart on US energy policy. Also, despite all the media posturing, the Paris accords are basically a "voluntary goal" (of about 2deg C), no actual hard limits. The only thing of consequence about them is the $100B slush fund for clean energy projects in 3rd world countries. Sure it was all that could be agreed to, but it's kind of a bad joke, really. The only real argument for staying in them is that it "looks" good to not pull out.
I think there's something to be said for low UIDs :-)
Yes, definitely there's something to be said: low UIDs are overrated!
FWIW as you noted, the cones in our eyes have "band-pass" filters in order form them so to accurate receive colors is not really that important the for the RGB spectra of the pixels match the LMS (long medium short) band-pass filters of the cones in your eye, only that the relative response is maintained.
Having said that the way you sense colors is not at all how your eye receives the stimulus from the cones in your eyes. First of all, the colors are not sensed as relative responses, but opponent color responses: L-M (aka R-G), L+M-S (aka Y-B) and intensity. This makes for some interesting colors that are not sensed (e.g., reddish-green and yellowish-blue) and even some "impossible" colors. This amplifies any mismatch in your "filters" so unless they are *exact*, you will sense the difference.
Fortunately (unfortunately?) the way we perceive colors is different than the way we sense colors. Your brain is really painting the colors for your perception in your visual cortex after it's done some "white-balancing" too so what color you remember is a significantly influence by your setting and context. Remember the blue/black dress that broke the internet (or was it gold)?
Long story short, what you think of as perceiving color is really only "hinted" at by the cone response in your eyes. Any ability to distinguish "shades" of color is really a contrast response, not a color frequency response.
Back to this new technology, of course if you are a "traditionalist" and still believe in absolute color and frequency responses and gamuts, probably won't like this new technology at all given these pathetic gamut tracings, but if you follow a bit down the rabbit hole of your visual cortex, and look at what was once possible with Kinemacolor a (simple two-color) processes and realize that what most people think of as color, really isn't how you perceive color at all, it is really all in your head.
> My grandpa sold his (ironically chinese) restaurant just after the I-80 bypass was completed in the mid '70s. The town has never been the same since.
Trump will get a Chinese restaurant to open and that will Make Rawlins Great Again (tm).
It'll never be as good as this...
I imagine the biggest employer is a welfare check.
Unemployment in Rawlins is about 5% (not that there are many people there 10,000). It's not like there are unemployed coal miners hanging around Rawlins picking up welfare pining for the mines to reopen. Coal hasn't been a factor in Rawlins employment for many decades (maybe even since around 1900, all the active coal mining you hear about in northern Wyoming around Gillette, not Rawlins in the south). You aren't retraining those Rawlins coal mining folks, they are long gone...
The big employers in Rawlins (Railroad, Refinery, Penitentiary) all pay pretty good. Maybe if you are working at Tacohell or the new Walmart that just opened up you might be on welfare (as you would be in any part of the USA). Generally if you are of working age and don't work for Railroad, Refinery, or Penitentiary, you probably either started working for Uranium mining companies, or the various wind farms that have sprung up (but even the largest of them, CCSM, only has about ~100 non-construction jobs), or like most, left town for the Dakotas to work on fracking projects about 10 years ago. Unless you really enjoy hunting and fishing. There's really no reason to stay in Rawlins unless you like hunting and fishing (unless you somehow enjoy gusting winds all the time).
This article seems to imply that layed-off coal miners from Gillette will move down to Rawlins to work on windfarms and is trying to entice them with training. All that might do is trigger another mini-boomlet in Rawlins (like the mini Uranium boomlet). I suspect many of these folks from Gillette will migrate to fracking projects in the Dakotas instead or move into more transient energy-construction jobs (like making the wind farm, not operating it), but we shall see...
Actually over the last few years there's been a mini boom in Rawlins (the county seat of Carbon County), Wyoming. The boom wasn't coal (that's been long gone except for some small coal liquification projects), but in Uranium mining in neighboring Sweetwater County. I guess retraining uranium miners doesn't have the same "green" backstory that the press wants to write about.
It's *really* windy there all the time, so back in 2001, one company built a windfarm in nearby Medicine Bow (111MW farm), and there are many more under construction in the area. I wonder if this Chinese company simply can't find enough workers in the area and wants to train some.
FWIW, my family has been in Rawlins since the '50s and really there are only 3 big employers in the area: Railroad, Sinclair refinery, and the State Penitentiary. Rawlins used to be a big stop on US highway 30, but when they built the I-80 bypass, the town died (kind of like in the fictional movie Cars, Radiator Springs used to be a big stop on US highway 66, but when they built the I-40 bypass, the town died). My grandpa sold his (ironically chinese) restaurant just after the I-80 bypass was completed in the mid '70s. The town has never been the same since.
There are a wide range of commercial drones that shockingly are not armed with military munitions. Technically, those $10 quad-copter remote controlled toys you can buy at a mall kiosk are drones.
I suppose the govt doesn't want to be sued every time a police dept decides to take one down because it is harassing someone and keep an FOIA subpoena-able record of this...
You do REALIZE that Crimea was apart of Russia before the United States was even a country? Or do they not teach you idiots history?
As I recall Crimea was *apart* from Russia until Catherine the Great defeated the Ottoman Empire in 1783. Although the constitution of the US wasn't adopted until 1789, I think USA was technically a country between 1776 and 1789...
Although the Russians managed to keep Crimea after the Crimean war (1856), as an indirect consequence of that war, the Russia ended up selling Alaska to the USA. This was part of a bizarre time when US and Russia actually were allies. During the US civil war (1861-1865), Britain was the meddling country trying to destabilize the Union government and Russia was one of our only friends. Russia had just liberated their serfs following the Crimean War aligning themselves with the Union release of the southern slaves and Russian diplomats gave Lincoln a heads up about a French-UK plan to enter the war on the side of the Confederacy and forcing the Union to recognize the Confederacy as a nation. Somehow we kept that relationship with Russia up until WWI.
Politics sometimes makes strange bedfellows...
I suspect that may be the answer. Lots of chemicals sold by international companies specializing in chemicals (e.g., Fisher, Baker) have switched their raw suppliers from Western sources to China. As we all know, you have to ride herd constantly on Chinese suppliers because they will take any shortcut they can to save money.
It wouldn't surprise me if the latest batches failed QC testing here in the States even after supposedly passing QA at their source. Even more fun, if FDA inspectors found problems anywhere in the supply chain it may take a while to remedy. With only two end product suppliers problems at one can cause a shortage very fast.
Hospira (a Pfizer company), which is the one that has the shortage, has had a recent history with quality control issue (problems with cardboard particulates in injectable vancomycin).
FWIW, in an email, a spokesman said the shortage is due to issues with a third-party supplier but not the API supplier. (API means active pharmaceutical ingredient), so it isn't likely to be the actual soda ash / bicarbonate supplier that is the issue per se, but perhaps some other company that supplies testing materials, or perhaps some packaging supplier. As I mentioned the USA is one of the largest suppliers of sodium bicarbonate, it seems unlikely that there is a simply sourcing problem with the basic ingredient and not something fixed by going to China.
I would suggest going to another country, but apparently it's illegal to import medicine (for Americans).
The top producers and consumers of sodium bicarbonate are China and the USA. Europe is the next largest and they consume nearly all of their own production.
I'm not so sure that many would want to follow your suggestion of importing pharma grade sodium bicarbonate from China...
Purity.
Not exactly. Both food grade and pharma grade sodium bicarbonate are greater than 99% "pure". Many industrial producers make both food and pharma grade sodium bicarbonate, some of them on the same line and processed to the same purity level...
The difference is that Pharma grade sodium bicarbonate is specifically tested to assure very small levels of certain specific impurities** mostly to minimize potential issues with inconvenient formation of various precipitates and other complications in equipment (e.g., hemodialysis), or your body.
All that product testing/certification isn't cheap and is completely unnecessary if you are simply eating it. For example, if 0.05% of the impurity was NaCl or MgCl, that would *bad* in your blood, but if you ate the typical amount of bicarbonate, you wouldn't even notice that impurity.
**USP has specific tests for impurities such as Chloride (0.015%), Sulfur (0.015%), Aluminium (2ug/g), Arsenic (2ppm), Calcium (0.01%), Magnesium (0.004%), Copper (1ppm). Iron (5ppm), Ammonia (20ppm), Organics (0.01%), etc...
Science is facing a raft of politically-motivated studies, rigged or suppressed medical trials, false or irreproducible results are rampant. But the big problem is "lack of diversity"??
I would think if you demanded rigor and accountability for the actual science part of the job, you wouldn't have to worry too much about who was doing the work.
Of all the places SJW types should stay the hell out of, aside from politics, its science.
If this was any other endeavor, people would be talking about a boycott... Apparently science is deemed important enough not to boycott of organizations that didn't tow the PC line. Maybe there is hope for rationality after all (or did I speak too soon)...
Apparently, it's gotten so bad that even when it's different, it's the same.
This is supposedly the book that ruined hollywood...
This book took the history of three-act blockbuster movies and distilled movie making into a minute-to-minute movie formula (a beat sheet) for future amateur screen writers. Apparently, the author died in 2009 (the book was published in 2005) so he probably didn't know how bad it would become and can't even repent...
Yes, and every single detected photon in the universe is a counterfactual to all the other paths the photon could have taken. Normally, these paths are numerous and unknowable, but if you build a machine just right, you can restrict the paths so much that there are just a few, and witnessing one path can eliminate some others as possibilities, and also prove the existence of a separate but coherent path.
Although restricting the paths is one way to do this (with the quantum bomb detector), I believe the proposed quantum counterfactual communicaton technique actually uses the Quantum Zeno Effect. Instead of restricting the paths of a photon, the Quantum Zeno effect restricts the time-evolution of the photon temporarily preventing quantum decoherence.
Basically a watched pot never boils on (quantum) steroids.
This Quantum Zeno effect has also been proposed as the mechanism for long spin coherence lifetimes of radical-ion pairs that birds likely use for Magnetoreception
You are misunderstanding quantum counterfactual communications.
Quantum counterfactual communications uses the principle of interaction-free measurement. Although the information was phase encoded in photons, the information is transmitted in photons that are not actually sent to the receiver. Strangely (and this is hard to understand) photons are sent with some probability to the receiver, so it's possible that the receiver receives some photons, but those photons actually sent don't actually encode the information, but the information is conveyed by the photons that don't actually get sent. That way any photons that incidentally get sent can be "observed" without consequence of wave function collapse of the information.
This is similar effect to the quantum bomb detector thought experiment.
One interesting multi-verse interpretation of the multi-path bomb detectors is that in the universes where the photon took the path where the bomb went off aren't our universe, so we get to experience the consequence of the photon taking the other path. Similarly in this quantum counterfactual communication, we get to experience the consequences of the photons that were not transmitted.
If they've just formed how can they be the same as a bunch that have been around since the cold war, and why do they have a different name?
Because Special Executive Committee for Reconsidering Elections was already taken.
The group intends to create a "shadow security council," or an expert group capable of providing advice to world leaders on nuclear matters...
SO to counter all the other shadow governments organizations that swarm around giving bad advice to the elected government officials, they've decided to make yet-another shadow government. GLWT.
I suspect these people are mad they can't manipulate elections their way anymore, they've decided to take their toys back and play amongst themselves. I'm gonna take my clock and go home!
Myself I have always mourned that Motorola never could increase the frequency of the MC680x0 beyond 66Mhz and keep up with Intel because that architecture was a real beauty to program in assembler.
Historically that's one of the things that always boggled my mind, Intel's instruction set had no protected mode until quite late, so programmers had to do some interesting things that often resulted in problems and the computer crashing anyway (IE Windows BSOD) or had to rely on a single-tasker operating system where it didn't matter so much; Motorola's chips had Supervisor Mode that was a protected mode, but Apple chose to ignore its existence when writing "System"/MacOS, where running multiple simultaneous applications in a GUI it would have been highly beneficial.
Just never understood that, especially when Apple had left the CLI world even before they completely dropped the Apple II line.
Supervisor mode in 68k was pretty much just an alt-stack pointer. Virtual memory support and similar protections was a function of the peripheral chips used in the system back in those days (not really highly integrated). The peripheral chip chosen by apple for the mac didn't support virtual memory and without such memory protection it probably wasn't worth the effort. Also you couldn't really run more than one program at a time anyhow.
By the time switcher and multi-finder features were added to finder, the shortcomings of this were obvious, but w/o virtual memory, it's hard to fix. SW constructs like handles instead of pointers patched over the situation (the same technique was used in Windows and other contemporary OSs to cover up for their lack of VM).
It wasn't until OSX where virtual memory was fully supported and that was much much later...
And lest we leave out the "post office", please read this wiki entry on the Thurn-und-Taxis Post. This was a private company. Nearly all german states still continued to contract with this company to handle postal service after they were finally given the right to create their own postal service. Eventually this was nationalized by Prussia as well.
In contrast, in the USA, the postal service has been a government monopoly from the get-go.
I think people's general observation about the government owning everything in Europe somehow also assumes it started that way, which is far from the historical record. In fact, historically, it has often been the case that either private enterprises make the first move and government later nationalizing these endeavors OR "royal" governments handing a lucrative contract to some "nobelmen" who enrich themselves by spending public monopoly money in the name of the state to build their own private dynasty (eventually morphing into companies and getting nationalized as post-royal European governments gained political power and money).
By the way, the latter is happen in contemporary china ("nobelmen" in communist china were military and politburo folks) and is making some people really really rich (like their european dynasty prototypes)...
But the government "technically" owns it all either way...
Sigh... I think people need to study history more.
Let's just take German railway history as an example. Please google the Deil Valley Railway Company (one of the first joint stock companies in Germany). It wasn't until later that railway operation like these were taken over by the Bergisch-Markisch Railway Company and only later these private enterprises were nationalized by the the Prussian State Railway.
Nearly all the other public works in Europe have a similar history, sure they belong to the government, but that's either because they contracted a company to do it, or bought out (or nationalized) that company later.
Call me a communist if you need to, but I'd rather not see something as important in humanity's future as space exploration in *exckusively* private hands.
Just look at how well privately owned essential infrastructure works out for the masses all over the world so far, e.g. with internet, mobile phones, water, public transportation, health...
Some perspective: 3.5 billion is less than the military spending of the USA in one single day. Less than even the *increase* in budget from 2016 to 2017, by more than an order of magnitude.
Okay, I'll call you a communist. Historically, it's been the case with nearly all "public" infrastructure outside of communist countries that private companies, plan it, design it, organize short-term financing for it, build it, maintain it. Of course with public infrastructure, the government is there to consult, kibitz, cajole, zone, and regulate it, and inevitably foots most of the bill, but of course owns the artifact at the end of the day.
Often as an incentive to reduce public outlays, concessions are offered to the public companies to reduce the actual net present cost to the public for the infrastructure. E.g., build a dock or railroad and you get this adjacent land for development, design a spacecraft for us and you can take the technology to build rockets for private launches, etc, etc...
Eventually, these *concessions* to private companies can form the seed for whole new private enterprise that accelerate the economy of a country. Call me an evil capitalist, but that's the way it works... the even the socialist (pseudo-communist USSR and China) world...
How does this work in your theoretical communist world?
The whole idea that Silicon Valley VCs are somehow *looking* for unicorn companies or unicorn ideas is totally ass-backward.
Silicon Valley VCs believe they can *create* unicorns by throwing money at them. They aren't looking for them per-se. They are looking for the "right team", the "right investment", etc... The actual idea? Maybe a company can pivot to an idea before the iron grows cold and they are off to the next team. Or not.
A billion dollar valuation (aka unicorn) simply means VCs have managed to get some 3rd or 4th round chumps to dump a bunch of money into a company for a microscopic share of equity. The smart investors either came in early, or have financing structures with warrants that are dilutive (meaning they didn't actually invest at unicorn levels) unlike the employees that usually promised fully diluted shares some day. The whole fiction of unicorns is simply a media creation and has nothing to do with the market potential of a company. Like Enron or Adelphia accounting, it's a fiction that only has to do with the esoteric machinations of valuation and financing a startup.
I suspect the main reason nobody is pivoting towards medicaid recipients is that silicon valley companies probably don't think they can compete with the fraud levels that are out there. If some SV company thought they figured out a way to skim medicaid dollars, they probably can't hold a candle to what people are already doing to the system. It's hard to beat scammers at their own game (esp if you are trying to play fair). On the other hand, maybe a Uber-like company might want to tackle this, but I don't know if that would be a good thing.
The Ptolemaic model was not science, it was a complex mathematical model built to shoehorn in a whole pack of observations into a much older geocentric view of the universe. It sure the heck wasn't science
Well, the history of science has been filled with shoehorning.
The "science" that preceded relativity started as a complex mathematical model built to shoehorn in a whole pack of observations into a much older non-relativistic (aether) view of the universe.
The "science" that preceded quantum mechanics started as a complex mathematical model built to shoehorn in a whole pack of observation into a much older non-quantum (deterministic) view of the universe.
It often takes quite a while for views of our universe to change and not everyone goes along quietly. Simply dismissing the stuff that came before as "sure the heck wasn't science" doesn't really honor the scientific method at all. We'd be pretty arrogant to think that 100 years from now, all the "science" we have come up with today won't be looked at with derision and dismissiveness.
Even Einstein (who came up with relativity and won a Nobel prize for the quantum mechanical photo-electric effect) spent years trying to dismiss the currently accepted quantum view of the universe (the probabilistic view, aka god does not play dice) and many think never fully accepted it. I don't think he's the only one either...
Food for thought.
Even if only 2.21% of Indian new college graduates made the highest grade, Indian universities graduate about 1 Million engineers every year. In contrast, in the USA, we get about 100k engineering graduates every year and 100% of them don't make the highest grade.
On the other hand, this company Aspiring Minds has a specific agenda...
However, the need of the hour is to find these pockets and scale them up to make an exponential impact on employability. This is crucial for India to continue its growth story and achieve the vision of India becoming the human resource provider for the whole world.
Interesting to note that one of the sales pitches they use to sell this testing product seems to be bringing up the spectre of a shortage of Indian talent causing salaries for talent growing out of control decreasing the advantage India might have in this area.
Although I understand the Indian culture seems to worshiping testing, but if I were and engineer asked to sit for this, I think I would simply just be offended by such a company. Not just because of the fact that they are trying to create a test whose end goal is to keep salaries down, but also by the audacity of a company to think that a computerized test could substitute for employment screening and job aptitude.
Then again maybe I have options. If I didn't I might just suck it in and take the test. After all, Einstein when his back was against the wall and no professorship was forthcoming, signed up to be a Patent clerk. Compared to him, in a pinch I probably should be happy with a job as a Walmart greeter, so taking this godforsaken test wouldn't be the worst thing in the world.
We won't have access to the source code to GPL it. The BSD code will be modified and re-licensed as proprietary before it ever reaches us.
But I already have the code and am building it right now.
Just because you *have* the code, doesn't mean you can GPL the code. The author is the only one that has that right (because they own the copyrights) unless they delegate those rights to someone else (like is common practice in the linux kernel). Did the authors of fuchsia (presumably folks @google) delegate the rights to you or the FSF? or is your intention to simply steal it and stick a GPL on it.