considering the quantity, there has to be somebody dumping garbage on a massive scale somewhere. I checked the Wikipedia article and it doesn't mention anything about the source. Considering the high cost of land in asia a doubt if landfills are good option. there has to be large scale dumping going on somewhere of post-consumer garbage.
FWIW, my understanding that about 80% of the plastics come from land based sources. Much of the plastic is post-consumer waste from urban runoff: sourced from beach litter, rivers and storm drains near large cities. Another large source is garbage transport lossage (e.g., things that fall off barges and trucks on their way to landfills or recycling centers). The biggest industrial source is plastics manufacturers that spill plastic pellets (which generally gets swept up in urban runoff).
In southern California alone, the EPA estimated that 4.5 million pounds per year is produced by post-consumer urban runoff.
There are of course people who dump garbage directly into the water like fishing boats, and commercial ships, and there are always a few lost shipping containers, but apparently they account for less than 20% of the pacific garbage patch.
Landfills are very common in asia. But of course there are problems. The number 1 problem is the waste transportation infrastructure is weak and has minimal regulations. Also, the landfills themselves don't have the best technology (the leach all sorts of toxins because of poor hydrology and other leachate issues, no methane management generating greenhouse gasses, uncontrolled tipping reducing the density, etc). A large amount of garbage in the pacific is attributable to the waste transportation problem, and I'm sure a few barge operator might ditch a load or two, but given the scale of their operations, they aren't just dumping everything in the river (which they would eventually have to dredge to continue their operations if they did that).
So to answer your question, apparently people in coastal cities litter on a massive scale which is due to urban runoff is apparently contributing much of the garbage patch. Depending on estimates it could be as much as 50%...
"in terms of what other system could we try to explain the observed phenomena that we call entanglement?" Specifically (while I realize it cannot be used to transmit information), how is it faster than light? Is the concept of locality a defensible one?
Interestingly enough like most effects of quantum mechanics, entanglement does not have an easy macroscopic analog to compare. One way to think about it is that it is a type of emergent behavior because of the rules that QM appear to follow.
More specifically, entanglement is kind of emergent behavior that is a logical consequence of conservation rules and quantum superposition states. If you believe in the QM rules regarding conservation (e.g, conservation of say spin), and QM rules involved with superposition wave function collapse (e.g., so called "observation"), the emergent consequence of these rules is a behavior we call entanglement.
The macroscopic analog is sort of as follows. Suppose you have 1 balls and 2 boxes. By some method hidden from you, the ball into one of the two boxes and it is sealed. If you believe in conservation of balls, The two boxes are now entangled. You can move them arbitrarily far apart and then open one box, if it has a ball, you instantly know the other doesn't have a ball.
Where this breaks down is how you put the ball in the box. In the QM version of this, the method of which you put the ball into the box doesn't really put the ball into the box, it simply puts a type of probability of a ball into a box. Interestingly enough, the box can act sort of like a 1/2 ball in the box until you open it and then it "collapses" and is either a ball or not ball. The strange part is how can it act as if there is a 1/2 ball in the box before you open it? If you think of the decision being made when you seal the box, there is some sort of locality, but if you think of the decision being made when you open the 1/2 filled box, there is non-locality and you need to use a concept like entanglement as an emergent behavior.
That is 1/2 ball in the box (part particle, part wave) is QM and nobody really understands that part, so there's really not an analogous macroscopic system on which to understand it, because the systems we are familiar with don't follow those rules.
On the concept of locality, it's really unknown. We generally think of distance and time (warped by general relativity) as the way we measure locality (e.g., light cones, etc), but there isn't a clear idea if there isn't a macro-dimension or holographic way that alters our understanding what is local or non-local. Using current theories, we already speculate that there are singular violations of locality (e..g, EPR's or worm-holes, etc), and we don't understand the fabric of space-time (e.g quantum gravity) well enough to say if our current theories about this are descriptive enough to yield our current intuitions about space-time locality or if it will be as weird as QM.
At the very least, if you have two contracted suppliers who can both provide the same goods, there is no reason your contracts should restrict you from just grabbing shit from Newegg.
Although that theoretically could be made part of a IT hardware support contract, you can bet that will affect the cost of a support contract (if a support contract can't make money on the hw side, they will simply charge more elsewhere). At the end of the day, the highly bundled contracts tend to come in with overall lower cost (and the inevitable lower service) than the unbundled contracts.
If nothing else, for a business, it's generally cheaper to sell more shit to your current customer than pay customer acquisition costs to find new customers, so contracts that bundle more will generally reflect this cost savings.
This is true for IT, construction, to food services, etc. The reason is generally because reducing the uncertainty in the amount of the total dollars to the vendor and reduction of the overhead of a single provider allows them to reduce the gross margin needed to cover the uncertainty and maintain a certain aggregate profit ratio (e.g., if random chance causes you can lose some money somewhere you make it back somewhere else in the contract).
Sure the marginal performance of that contract suffers relative to someone cherry picking cost savings, but at the end of the day, everyone needs to eat, so it is kind of a zero-sum game. Your savings is the contracting companies loss, so they have to make it up somewhere (new customers, charging you more for the rest of it, etc).
You clearly are not aware of how bad a no-bid procurement process can get. Sadly I've seen it in action and let's say it would put third world countries to shame. Not that the current system eliminates the problem, but it does reduce it's magnitude.
Also, you can't do social engineering w/o approved vendors sources (not that I approve of social engineering by government, but apparently a large majority of people seem to want it). Things like minority or woman owned businesses contract/sub-contract set-asides, living wage requirements, union affinity, steering money to constituency etc, would be basically be moot. You might argue this is a good thing, but apparently that is not the current majority thinking.
Maybe they're too busy trying to do anything to repay their crushing debt that they cannot even dream of starting their own business..
Perhaps they should have taken a cue from those that *dropped-out* of school to start their business and avoid those pesky student loans in the first place. I mean, it's likely that many of those that are being *crushed* by student loans weren't taking classes on how to start a business, but rather more likely they were taking classes in an attempt to become more *employable*, not *entrepreneurial* (as most people who attend college tend to do).
Sure, maybe the college game as it is currently constructed is rigged (not enough bang for the buck), and you might argue it needs more bang or less buck to fix it, but that doesn't mean students shouldn't be playing the game as best they can. Right now we see many students taking out monster student loans and attempting degrees that don't help them (either they are not talented enough to benefit from the degree, or the degree itself isn't worth the money they are investing). People shouldn't play the game they want to play and bemoan the outcome, they need to read the rules and play the best game they can (or don't play the game at all).
Play or not play the college game, you can still of course attempt to change the rules, but if you find yourself at the juncture of deciding if/how to play, it's probably too late for you, any change you are working towards is only likely to benefit those that come after you (which may be your kids, or relatives, so you still shouldn't choose to play poorly).
Unless of course you want to be a martyr and *want* to play the college game poorly to make a point.
Of course..."The image translators work for the construct program. But there's way too much information to decode the Matrix. You get used to it. I...I don't even see the code. All I see is blonde, brunette, red-head."
IANAL, but as I understand it, you only need to register for a copyright if
* you want to be eligible to collect statutory* damages (as opposed to damages for actual loss) and attorney's fees * you want the US custom's service to enforce your copyright claim (e.g., confiscating recordings)
You also need to register before you can file a copyright infringement claim in court (as opposed to a standard tort or civil claim). But since you can technically register your work anytime during the lifetime of the copyright coverage, you can nearly always wait to register until right before you file your claim for infringement (assuming you discover the infringement before your copyright coverage and the associated statute of limitations expires).
However, if you register too long after you created your work, you risk having to actually prove the retroactive origination date in court to establish infringement, whereas contemporary registration would have established this fact w/o dispute in court. Probably not too hard to prove the date in this case (or most cases)
*getting a judge to statutory damages award would be a pretty good reason to register if say likely infringers would caused damages that you can't easily prove (e.g., the few micro-cents of revenue from missed views on youtube).
Of course nowhere near, doesn't mean never, but it's quite possible that "tokamak" might be some quaint historical footnote when we get to something that is actually practical.
If you look at ITER, it's got so many technologies it's trying to research simultaneously, that it's hard to see it actually being a practical step towards DEMO or PROTO (its theoretical follow-ons) where they will actually try and extract the electricity (ITER doesn't include a mechanism to convert energy to electricity)
I have no particular insight into ITER or this new MIT design, but I have studied the Fort St. Vrain attempt at HTGR fission and the Oak ridge Thorium reactors and have tried to survey what they are doing in the NIF (although it's much harder to get good information about what they are doing) and putting things into commercial development is hard to do on a timeline because there is theory and then there is practice (which is why they build all these research reactors).
One big material science problem they are trying to solve with ITER is a way to build a so-called breeder blanket so they can bleed some of the fusion neutrons to create more tritium (which is rare enough to be uneconomical to refine from the ocean to use as fuel). I don't know how the MIT design would even help with this as they appear to concentrating on increasing the magnetic field for tighter confinement, not making a practical reactor.
Of course there are also the material science problems (confinement and super-conducting magnetic materials that can handle the high neutron flux over the operating life of the reactor).
Using the older fission programs as benchmarks, it's a pretty clear feeling to me we are nowhere near getting to where we need to be before fusion becomes a real practical technology and not a theoretical technology and we probably aren't even $100billion in funding away (the cost of the Apollo moon program in today's dollars).
It's not impossible though (apple is a merely a $700billion dollar company), but it's gonna take a while even if "properly funded"
People really need to understand that we are nowhere near breaking even on fusion reactors (e.g., producing more energy than you put in) and any fusion reactor designs are purely for research in fusion physics and similar...
Previously, Google would not have been able to sell a new stock of "just" (Internet Search Only) Google, or for any of their individual projects, it was all one thing.
Actually, that is categorically not true. A company can create a "tracking" stock for a subsidiary or even a business function (like search), as long as it was willing to break out the reporting of that function.
The problem is that tracking stocks are not generally favored anymore by the street and probably wouldn't really work anyhow with the current Google structure (where Larry and Sergey have super-voting rights) as such a tracking stock would suffer the same albatross as GOOGL vs GOOG.
The value of what they have done is simply to provide more transparency about their businesses to the street and provide more deck chairs for potential C-level googlers that might want to defect. That's actually good value, but has nothing to do with being able to issue a stock for part of their business.
This does nothing to reduce corporate risk as all the companies are all wholly owned subsidiaries.
This move is simply to create more transparency into the financials that google search/ads/apps is providing the company to the large shareholders and create more chairs to promote C-level people (who might want to leave Google for career development).
FWIW, a good bullet to have on your resume is Profit/Loss responsibility to get/keep a ticket to the C-level clubhouse. If a Googler didn't have a way to get that at Google, they might be tempted to jump ship (and many have done so). By creating more deck chairs (by creating more companies within their conglomerate where they have to actually have to do separate P/L reporting) is a clever way to keep these people in the fold a bit longer (because gives them a chance to get their ticket punched). Of course wall street was clamoring for more transparency anyhow, so this kills 2 birds with 1 stone.
Personally, I favor an MGI, and I think the money should come from corporate taxes. But there are more loopholes than there are dollars.
Curious, what is your problem with the currently enacted Earned Income Credit vs a hypothetical Minimum Guaranteed Income scheme?
Do you object to the level of reimbursement the EIC? (phaseout after $31K) Do you object to the incentives in the EIC for a person to earn more to receive more benefits? (vs a typical MGI implementation where it doesn't matter how much you earn if you are below the absolute level) Do you object to the fact that it factors in the number of dependents? Do you object that it draws employees into the workforce which results in an increase in payroll taxes which offsets the cost of the program? Do you object to the fact that you actually have to file a tax return to claim it? Do you object to the current level of fraud in the program?
Or
Do you simply object to the fact that is a USA created construct (originally enacted during the Ford Administration in 1975), not a new fangled European construct?
You must be one of the couple dozen or so people that lives near a Sprint tower...
About the only time I got 5 bars on my sprint phone was in the airport, at my house and work, it generally got rounded down to zero bars unless I held my phone in the air and positioned my phone just so...
Sprint certainly offers cheap plans, although totally unworkable to me, so count me as one of those overpaying for getting actual service (as opposed to paying less for service that I wasn't able to use).
I think you are mistakenly assuming that driverless means AI will need to be good enough to drive better than average. I don't think that is true. All they need to do is be able to drive better than crappy drivers on the road today (e.g., those who make up the bottom 25% of drivers). Learners, elderly, those that have the attention span of a gnat or chat endlessly on phones whilst they drive, etc... There many more of them than average drivers.
When the driverless cars get good enough to be better than these people, insurance companies will push-out the crappy drivers into the arms of rental cars controlled by companies the size of Google or Uber. The insurance companies would like to do that today, but the government won't let them because in many cases it's a "hardship" to remove driving privileges for them (although they sometimes have license restrictions to daytime driving) so they force an uninsurable motorist pool as a tax on insurance companies. If the government had a viable alternative, don't you think they'd take it?
The problem in this new world will be the affordability of liability insurance for the average driver. If it's your fault and you hit one of these rental cars that is used nearly 100% uptime, the loss of revenue component of liability is going to raise insurance premiums through the roof...
Just wait until your car insurance has to cover gas, tires and oil changes.
Actually, just wait a little longer and your car insurance company won't cover you at all (only your self driving vehicle).
Then only the rich will be able to afford to drive, because all nearly all vehicles on the road will be rentals and the actuaries won't be able to justify covering a "loss-of-revenue" insurance claim from a vehicle collision w/o a massive premium cost for human piloted cars.
If you like to drive, you better start lobbying to keep no-fault insurance in your state now before it's too late...
While this first proof of concept is important, significant obstacles remain to make such white lasers applicable for real-life lighting or display applications. One of crucial next steps is to achieve the similar white lasers under the drive of a battery. For the present demonstration, the researchers had to use a laser light to pump electrons to emit light. This experimental effort demonstrates the key first material requirement and will lay the groundwork for the eventual white lasers under electrical operation.
The thing they made is probably best thought of as nano-interleaved resonator cavity for a laser diode (which needs to have certain band gaps to emit the light). Apparently for this proof of concept, they actually had to excite this nano-structured cavity, with an actual laser. These nano-structures couples the energy to desired tunable optical wavelengths which are nano-interleaved and thus allows emission of "white" light from the laser diode structure.
As far as I can tell, the breakthrough is to manufacture these nano-structures (nano-wires or nano-sheets) on the same substrate near each other (nano-spaced). To do this they developed a ion-substitution process which allows them to build the nano-wire structure with one material with certain lattice constants and later replace atoms to create a different lattice constant (changing the resonant wavelength of the structure), This alllowed them to make "blue" which generally so different than "red" that it previously needed to be fabricated with a different structure (making it hard to make nano-structures next to each other).
No you'd call the cops and have the guy arrested for being a peeping tom. It's not easy to ascertain who the snooper is with a UAV.
Maybe you call the cops first, then shoot down the UAV. Apparently there's empirical evidence snooper will voluntarily identify himself in to the cops in this case...
Clearly you don't understand engineering. Engineering isn't just "model your entire design". Engineering is decomposing your problem into problems that are "spec-able". For example, build your bridge out of steel and bolts. You don't have a model of bolts in your design, you have a spec for bolts that you use in your design that is testable (performance and tolerance) and then you use parts hierarchically in your design. The bolt is designed separately and is made out of some alloy that has specs and is tested (performance and tolerance)...
The problem with most software isn't that it can't be modelling and rely on basic physical principles, it's that many projects fail to take specs and testing seriously, and the specs that exist don't address performance and tolerance (aka, error handling). If software did this, things would be more engineered.
Right now many software artifacts are similar to the prehistoric bridges that cross chasms in jungles in third world countries. They work, people cross them every day, but things were made empirically so nobody knows what might cause them to fail, so it's hard to rely on them.
It's not that bridges that were built 100 years ago were "better", but they were actually built to specs and of course survive to this day (which can't be said for the prehistorical variety). However, improved bridges are continually desired so we use better parts and build even better bridges today because modeling allows us to get tighter specs on the parts that make up bridges and the stresses that we are putting on those parts.
But doing all that requires better engineering discipline not dismissing it as a something that isn't applicable. Engineering is an useful approximation of the physics (an approximation which always gets improved over time), not a practice of physics.
Doesn't mean they have to like it. The question was "why would management not like that?"
Say I was planning to pay my mortgage at the end of the month and the 10yo sports car I've been nursing along (to save money over buying a new car) decided it was time for a repair (say a smog issue) because the State of California changed the rules on acceptable NxOy emissions.
You might say I can't have it both ways, paying lower car expenses for a while assuming their won't be a potentially large repair bill for an older car and budgeting the savings for a larger mortgage expense, but I'm not so sure that I should be required to like the fact that I have to juggle my budget (and not take a long planned Hawaiian vacation)...
Maybe instead of fixing the car, I should probably dump it and buy a cheaper/ more reliable used car that I can afford... Maybe I was stupid in trying to nurse that sports car along because I actually couldn't really afford the potential expected costs, but at least I got to drive it around for a while (even my use of the car was potentially "unfair" to the car's ability to have a owner that took better care of it)...
Of course, my car doesn't have a choice, but if it were a person, would you question its choice of choosing me to begin with, or only after it had realized other owners might have more financial resources to take better care of it? Or would you blame me for accepting the use of the car in the first place...
Part of your pay is for what you do, part of your pay is to keep you from leaving and working somewhere else (presumably because they would have to hire and train someone new to replace you)...
If Steve, Alan and Lucy make 50 grand a year and you make 45 grand and your contributions to the company are comparable, but you really need the job because you are single parent in your mid-50's and don't want to go back into the job market in your mid-50's, and they all are married to high paying professionals...
Sadly, how much you personally want/need the job is sometimes factored into how much you are paid for that job... Maybe it shouldn't be that way, but that's how it works most of the time.
Large out-of-cycle compensation changes probably blow up their budget which gives management a big headache from a cash flow planning point of view. I suspect that's a reason not to like that.
This is especially true in some startups where there is generally minimal capital expenses and almost all cash is for payroll and factors straight to the burn rate. In most companies, the managers planning cash flow generally doesn't really know if people are being over-or-under paid and probably expects expenses for labor to be mostly predictable on longer budgeting timescales (just like employees expect their pay to be mostly predictable on longer timescales so they can budget for their expenses). Such companies are essentially living pay-check to pay-check and like many people aren't necessarily the most literate when it comes to financial matters (e.g., short term large variations in prevailing wages) until it hits them in the face.
Of course for a company like google that prints cash, it's probably just a few managers being embarrassed about their past compensation decisions, but at a personal level, I'm sure many managers are glad to pay equitably when people ask to keep the people any "good" people have these days (unless they have to "pay" for it by reducing their headcount numbers)...
I would sure as hell like to know what people made
at a company before I started there... aftewards, meh not so much..
That's a bit short sighted... Esp given the current trend of paying new people in this competitive job market more than current employees for similar positions... Although if you don't care about being underpaid, I guess it doesn't matter much...
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considering the quantity, there has to be somebody dumping garbage on a massive scale somewhere. I checked the Wikipedia article and it doesn't mention anything about the source. Considering the high cost of land in asia a doubt if landfills are good option. there has to be large scale dumping going on somewhere of post-consumer garbage.
FWIW, my understanding that about 80% of the plastics come from land based sources. Much of the plastic is post-consumer waste from urban runoff: sourced from beach litter, rivers and storm drains near large cities. Another large source is garbage transport lossage (e.g., things that fall off barges and trucks on their way to landfills or recycling centers). The biggest industrial source is plastics manufacturers that spill plastic pellets (which generally gets swept up in urban runoff).
In southern California alone, the EPA estimated that 4.5 million pounds per year is produced by post-consumer urban runoff.
There are of course people who dump garbage directly into the water like fishing boats, and commercial ships, and there are always a few lost shipping containers, but apparently they account for less than 20% of the pacific garbage patch.
Landfills are very common in asia. But of course there are problems. The number 1 problem is the waste transportation infrastructure is weak and has minimal regulations. Also, the landfills themselves don't have the best technology (the leach all sorts of toxins because of poor hydrology and other leachate issues, no methane management generating greenhouse gasses, uncontrolled tipping reducing the density, etc). A large amount of garbage in the pacific is attributable to the waste transportation problem, and I'm sure a few barge operator might ditch a load or two, but given the scale of their operations, they aren't just dumping everything in the river (which they would eventually have to dredge to continue their operations if they did that).
So to answer your question, apparently people in coastal cities litter on a massive scale which is due to urban runoff is apparently contributing much of the garbage patch. Depending on estimates it could be as much as 50%...
"in terms of what other system could we try to explain the observed phenomena that we call entanglement?" Specifically (while I realize it cannot be used to transmit information), how is it faster than light? Is the concept of locality a defensible one?
Interestingly enough like most effects of quantum mechanics, entanglement does not have an easy macroscopic analog to compare. One way to think about it is that it is a type of emergent behavior because of the rules that QM appear to follow.
More specifically, entanglement is kind of emergent behavior that is a logical consequence of conservation rules and quantum superposition states. If you believe in the QM rules regarding conservation (e.g, conservation of say spin), and QM rules involved with superposition wave function collapse (e.g., so called "observation"), the emergent consequence of these rules is a behavior we call entanglement.
The macroscopic analog is sort of as follows. Suppose you have 1 balls and 2 boxes. By some method hidden from you, the ball into one of the two boxes and it is sealed. If you believe in conservation of balls, The two boxes are now entangled. You can move them arbitrarily far apart and then open one box, if it has a ball, you instantly know the other doesn't have a ball.
Where this breaks down is how you put the ball in the box. In the QM version of this, the method of which you put the ball into the box doesn't really put the ball into the box, it simply puts a type of probability of a ball into a box. Interestingly enough, the box can act sort of like a 1/2 ball in the box until you open it and then it "collapses" and is either a ball or not ball. The strange part is how can it act as if there is a 1/2 ball in the box before you open it? If you think of the decision being made when you seal the box, there is some sort of locality, but if you think of the decision being made when you open the 1/2 filled box, there is non-locality and you need to use a concept like entanglement as an emergent behavior.
That is 1/2 ball in the box (part particle, part wave) is QM and nobody really understands that part, so there's really not an analogous macroscopic system on which to understand it, because the systems we are familiar with don't follow those rules.
On the concept of locality, it's really unknown. We generally think of distance and time (warped by general relativity) as the way we measure locality (e.g., light cones, etc), but there isn't a clear idea if there isn't a macro-dimension or holographic way that alters our understanding what is local or non-local. Using current theories, we already speculate that there are singular violations of locality (e..g, EPR's or worm-holes, etc), and we don't understand the fabric of space-time (e.g quantum gravity) well enough to say if our current theories about this are descriptive enough to yield our current intuitions about space-time locality or if it will be as weird as QM.
At the very least, if you have two contracted suppliers who can both provide the same goods, there is no reason your contracts should restrict you from just grabbing shit from Newegg.
Although that theoretically could be made part of a IT hardware support contract, you can bet that will affect the cost of a support contract (if a support contract can't make money on the hw side, they will simply charge more elsewhere). At the end of the day, the highly bundled contracts tend to come in with overall lower cost (and the inevitable lower service) than the unbundled contracts.
If nothing else, for a business, it's generally cheaper to sell more shit to your current customer than pay customer acquisition costs to find new customers, so contracts that bundle more will generally reflect this cost savings.
This is true for IT, construction, to food services, etc. The reason is generally because reducing the uncertainty in the amount of the total dollars to the vendor and reduction of the overhead of a single provider allows them to reduce the gross margin needed to cover the uncertainty and maintain a certain aggregate profit ratio (e.g., if random chance causes you can lose some money somewhere you make it back somewhere else in the contract).
Sure the marginal performance of that contract suffers relative to someone cherry picking cost savings, but at the end of the day, everyone needs to eat, so it is kind of a zero-sum game. Your savings is the contracting companies loss, so they have to make it up somewhere (new customers, charging you more for the rest of it, etc).
bidding wars and approved vendor sources don't.
You clearly are not aware of how bad a no-bid procurement process can get. Sadly I've seen it in action and let's say it would put third world countries to shame. Not that the current system eliminates the problem, but it does reduce it's magnitude.
Also, you can't do social engineering w/o approved vendors sources (not that I approve of social engineering by government, but apparently a large majority of people seem to want it). Things like minority or woman owned businesses contract/sub-contract set-asides, living wage requirements, union affinity, steering money to constituency etc, would be basically be moot. You might argue this is a good thing, but apparently that is not the current majority thinking.
Maybe they're too busy trying to do anything to repay their crushing debt that they cannot even dream of starting their own business..
Perhaps they should have taken a cue from those that *dropped-out* of school to start their business and avoid those pesky student loans in the first place. I mean, it's likely that many of those that are being *crushed* by student loans weren't taking classes on how to start a business, but rather more likely they were taking classes in an attempt to become more *employable*, not *entrepreneurial* (as most people who attend college tend to do).
Sure, maybe the college game as it is currently constructed is rigged (not enough bang for the buck), and you might argue it needs more bang or less buck to fix it, but that doesn't mean students shouldn't be playing the game as best they can. Right now we see many students taking out monster student loans and attempting degrees that don't help them (either they are not talented enough to benefit from the degree, or the degree itself isn't worth the money they are investing). People shouldn't play the game they want to play and bemoan the outcome, they need to read the rules and play the best game they can (or don't play the game at all).
Play or not play the college game, you can still of course attempt to change the rules, but if you find yourself at the juncture of deciding if/how to play, it's probably too late for you, any change you are working towards is only likely to benefit those that come after you (which may be your kids, or relatives, so you still shouldn't choose to play poorly).
Unless of course you want to be a martyr and *want* to play the college game poorly to make a point.
Art detracts from games. It's noise.
Of course..."The image translators work for the construct program. But there's way too much information to decode the Matrix. You get used to it. I...I don't even see the code. All I see is blonde, brunette, red-head."
What more can you ask for?
IANAL, but as I understand it, you only need to register for a copyright if
* you want to be eligible to collect statutory* damages (as opposed to damages for actual loss) and attorney's fees
* you want the US custom's service to enforce your copyright claim (e.g., confiscating recordings)
You also need to register before you can file a copyright infringement claim in court (as opposed to a standard tort or civil claim). But since you can technically register your work anytime during the lifetime of the copyright coverage, you can nearly always wait to register until right before you file your claim for infringement (assuming you discover the infringement before your copyright coverage and the associated statute of limitations expires).
However, if you register too long after you created your work, you risk having to actually prove the retroactive origination date in court to establish infringement, whereas contemporary registration would have established this fact w/o dispute in court. Probably not too hard to prove the date in this case (or most cases)
*getting a judge to statutory damages award would be a pretty good reason to register if say likely infringers would caused damages that you can't easily prove (e.g., the few micro-cents of revenue from missed views on youtube).
Sigh...
Of course nowhere near, doesn't mean never, but it's quite possible that "tokamak" might be some quaint historical footnote when we get to something that is actually practical.
If you look at ITER, it's got so many technologies it's trying to research simultaneously, that it's hard to see it actually being a practical step towards DEMO or PROTO (its theoretical follow-ons) where they will actually try and extract the electricity (ITER doesn't include a mechanism to convert energy to electricity)
I have no particular insight into ITER or this new MIT design, but I have studied the Fort St. Vrain attempt at HTGR fission and the Oak ridge Thorium reactors and have tried to survey what they are doing in the NIF (although it's much harder to get good information about what they are doing) and putting things into commercial development is hard to do on a timeline because there is theory and then there is practice (which is why they build all these research reactors).
One big material science problem they are trying to solve with ITER is a way to build a so-called breeder blanket so they can bleed some of the fusion neutrons to create more tritium (which is rare enough to be uneconomical to refine from the ocean to use as fuel). I don't know how the MIT design would even help with this as they appear to concentrating on increasing the magnetic field for tighter confinement, not making a practical reactor.
Of course there are also the material science problems (confinement and super-conducting magnetic materials that can handle the high neutron flux over the operating life of the reactor).
Using the older fission programs as benchmarks, it's a pretty clear feeling to me we are nowhere near getting to where we need to be before fusion becomes a real practical technology and not a theoretical technology and we probably aren't even $100billion in funding away (the cost of the Apollo moon program in today's dollars).
It's not impossible though (apple is a merely a $700billion dollar company), but it's gonna take a while even if "properly funded"
People really need to understand that we are nowhere near breaking even on fusion reactors (e.g., producing more energy than you put in) and any fusion reactor designs are purely for research in fusion physics and similar...
FTFY
Previously, Google would not have been able to sell a new stock of "just" (Internet Search Only) Google, or for any of their individual projects, it was all one thing.
Actually, that is categorically not true. A company can create a "tracking" stock for a subsidiary or even a business function (like search), as long as it was willing to break out the reporting of that function.
The problem is that tracking stocks are not generally favored anymore by the street and probably wouldn't really work anyhow with the current Google structure (where Larry and Sergey have super-voting rights) as such a tracking stock would suffer the same albatross as GOOGL vs GOOG.
The value of what they have done is simply to provide more transparency about their businesses to the street and provide more deck chairs for potential C-level googlers that might want to defect. That's actually good value, but has nothing to do with being able to issue a stock for part of their business.
This does nothing to reduce corporate risk as all the companies are all wholly owned subsidiaries.
This move is simply to create more transparency into the financials that google search/ads/apps is providing the company to the large shareholders and create more chairs to promote C-level people (who might want to leave Google for career development).
FWIW, a good bullet to have on your resume is Profit/Loss responsibility to get/keep a ticket to the C-level clubhouse. If a Googler didn't have a way to get that at Google, they might be tempted to jump ship (and many have done so). By creating more deck chairs (by creating more companies within their conglomerate where they have to actually have to do separate P/L reporting) is a clever way to keep these people in the fold a bit longer (because gives them a chance to get their ticket punched). Of course wall street was clamoring for more transparency anyhow, so this kills 2 birds with 1 stone.
For those that are actually curious about this "doomed" fantastic four film...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... (trailer)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... (actual movie)
Personally, I favor an MGI, and I think the money should come from corporate taxes. But there are more loopholes than there are dollars.
Curious, what is your problem with the currently enacted Earned Income Credit vs a hypothetical Minimum Guaranteed Income scheme?
Do you object to the level of reimbursement the EIC? (phaseout after $31K)
Do you object to the incentives in the EIC for a person to earn more to receive more benefits? (vs a typical MGI implementation where it doesn't matter how much you earn if you are below the absolute level)
Do you object to the fact that it factors in the number of dependents?
Do you object that it draws employees into the workforce which results in an increase in payroll taxes which offsets the cost of the program?
Do you object to the fact that you actually have to file a tax return to claim it?
Do you object to the current level of fraud in the program?
Or
Do you simply object to the fact that is a USA created construct (originally enacted during the Ford Administration in 1975), not a new fangled European construct?
You must be one of the couple dozen or so people that lives near a Sprint tower...
About the only time I got 5 bars on my sprint phone was in the airport, at my house and work, it generally got rounded down to zero bars unless I held my phone in the air and positioned my phone just so...
Sprint certainly offers cheap plans, although totally unworkable to me, so count me as one of those overpaying for getting actual service (as opposed to paying less for service that I wasn't able to use).
I think you are mistakenly assuming that driverless means AI will need to be good enough to drive better than average. I don't think that is true. All they need to do is be able to drive better than crappy drivers on the road today (e.g., those who make up the bottom 25% of drivers). Learners, elderly, those that have the attention span of a gnat or chat endlessly on phones whilst they drive, etc... There many more of them than average drivers.
When the driverless cars get good enough to be better than these people, insurance companies will push-out the crappy drivers into the arms of rental cars controlled by companies the size of Google or Uber. The insurance companies would like to do that today, but the government won't let them because in many cases it's a "hardship" to remove driving privileges for them (although they sometimes have license restrictions to daytime driving) so they force an uninsurable motorist pool as a tax on insurance companies. If the government had a viable alternative, don't you think they'd take it?
The problem in this new world will be the affordability of liability insurance for the average driver. If it's your fault and you hit one of these rental cars that is used nearly 100% uptime, the loss of revenue component of liability is going to raise insurance premiums through the roof...
Just wait until your car insurance has to cover gas, tires and oil changes.
Actually, just wait a little longer and your car insurance company won't cover you at all (only your self driving vehicle).
Then only the rich will be able to afford to drive, because all nearly all vehicles on the road will be rentals and the actuaries won't be able to justify covering a "loss-of-revenue" insurance claim from a vehicle collision w/o a massive premium cost for human piloted cars.
If you like to drive, you better start lobbying to keep no-fault insurance in your state now before it's too late...
Besides, my doctor got arrested for defrauding companies, why shouldn't Obama get the credit for that?
Because it was probably an insurance company that investigated your doctor and discovered that, not the federal government...
While this first proof of concept is important, significant obstacles remain to make such white lasers applicable for real-life lighting or display applications. One of crucial next steps is to achieve the similar white lasers under the drive of a battery. For the present demonstration, the researchers had to use a laser light to pump electrons to emit light. This experimental effort demonstrates the key first material requirement and will lay the groundwork for the eventual white lasers under electrical operation.
The thing they made is probably best thought of as nano-interleaved resonator cavity for a laser diode (which needs to have certain band gaps to emit the light). Apparently for this proof of concept, they actually had to excite this nano-structured cavity, with an actual laser. These nano-structures couples the energy to desired tunable optical wavelengths which are nano-interleaved and thus allows emission of "white" light from the laser diode structure.
As far as I can tell, the breakthrough is to manufacture these nano-structures (nano-wires or nano-sheets) on the same substrate near each other (nano-spaced). To do this they developed a ion-substitution process which allows them to build the nano-wire structure with one material with certain lattice constants and later replace atoms to create a different lattice constant (changing the resonant wavelength of the structure), This alllowed them to make "blue" which generally so different than "red" that it previously needed to be fabricated with a different structure (making it hard to make nano-structures next to each other).
No you'd call the cops and have the guy arrested for being a peeping tom. It's not easy to ascertain who the snooper is with a UAV.
Maybe you call the cops first, then shoot down the UAV. Apparently there's empirical evidence snooper will voluntarily identify himself in to the cops in this case...
Clearly you don't understand engineering. Engineering isn't just "model your entire design". Engineering is decomposing your problem into problems that are "spec-able". For example, build your bridge out of steel and bolts. You don't have a model of bolts in your design, you have a spec for bolts that you use in your design that is testable (performance and tolerance) and then you use parts hierarchically in your design. The bolt is designed separately and is made out of some alloy that has specs and is tested (performance and tolerance)...
The problem with most software isn't that it can't be modelling and rely on basic physical principles, it's that many projects fail to take specs and testing seriously, and the specs that exist don't address performance and tolerance (aka, error handling). If software did this, things would be more engineered.
Right now many software artifacts are similar to the prehistoric bridges that cross chasms in jungles in third world countries. They work, people cross them every day, but things were made empirically so nobody knows what might cause them to fail, so it's hard to rely on them.
It's not that bridges that were built 100 years ago were "better", but they were actually built to specs and of course survive to this day (which can't be said for the prehistorical variety). However, improved bridges are continually desired so we use better parts and build even better bridges today because modeling allows us to get tighter specs on the parts that make up bridges and the stresses that we are putting on those parts.
But doing all that requires better engineering discipline not dismissing it as a something that isn't applicable. Engineering is an useful approximation of the physics (an approximation which always gets improved over time), not a practice of physics.
In related news, scientists discover the result of experimenting with a 6th taste of everything: fat...
Well, they can't have it both ways.
Doesn't mean they have to like it. The question was "why would management not like that?"
Say I was planning to pay my mortgage at the end of the month and the 10yo sports car I've been nursing along (to save money over buying a new car) decided it was time for a repair (say a smog issue) because the State of California changed the rules on acceptable NxOy emissions.
You might say I can't have it both ways, paying lower car expenses for a while assuming their won't be a potentially large repair bill for an older car and budgeting the savings for a larger mortgage expense, but I'm not so sure that I should be required to like the fact that I have to juggle my budget (and not take a long planned Hawaiian vacation)...
Maybe instead of fixing the car, I should probably dump it and buy a cheaper/ more reliable used car that I can afford... Maybe I was stupid in trying to nurse that sports car along because I actually couldn't really afford the potential expected costs, but at least I got to drive it around for a while (even my use of the car was potentially "unfair" to the car's ability to have a owner that took better care of it)...
Of course, my car doesn't have a choice, but if it were a person, would you question its choice of choosing me to begin with, or only after it had realized other owners might have more financial resources to take better care of it? Or would you blame me for accepting the use of the car in the first place...
Not that easy...
Part of your pay is for what you do, part of your pay is to keep you from leaving and working somewhere else (presumably because they would have to hire and train someone new to replace you)...
If Steve, Alan and Lucy make 50 grand a year and you make 45 grand and your contributions to the company are comparable, but you really need the job because you are single parent in your mid-50's and don't want to go back into the job market in your mid-50's, and they all are married to high paying professionals...
Sadly, how much you personally want/need the job is sometimes factored into how much you are paid for that job... Maybe it shouldn't be that way, but that's how it works most of the time.
Remind me why would management not like that?
Large out-of-cycle compensation changes probably blow up their budget which gives management a big headache from a cash flow planning point of view. I suspect that's a reason not to like that.
This is especially true in some startups where there is generally minimal capital expenses and almost all cash is for payroll and factors straight to the burn rate. In most companies, the managers planning cash flow generally doesn't really know if people are being over-or-under paid and probably expects expenses for labor to be mostly predictable on longer budgeting timescales (just like employees expect their pay to be mostly predictable on longer timescales so they can budget for their expenses). Such companies are essentially living pay-check to pay-check and like many people aren't necessarily the most literate when it comes to financial matters (e.g., short term large variations in prevailing wages) until it hits them in the face.
Of course for a company like google that prints cash, it's probably just a few managers being embarrassed about their past compensation decisions, but at a personal level, I'm sure many managers are glad to pay equitably when people ask to keep the people any "good" people have these days (unless they have to "pay" for it by reducing their headcount numbers)...
I would sure as hell like to know what people made
at a company before I started there... aftewards, meh not so much..
That's a bit short sighted...
Esp given the current trend of paying new people in this competitive job market more than current employees for similar positions...
Although if you don't care about being underpaid, I guess it doesn't matter much...