Motivation to preserve? There's really no good motivation for preserving DNA other than historical preservation. Think of this like preserving the source code for apple//e prodos. The ecosystem which that source code was valuable has been long lost, probably never to come again. Newer source code that serves a similar ecological niche in the new eco-system will evolve and probably be better than it ever was.
Some people seem to be obsessed with a philosophy no different than modern day Noah's ark where we somehow survive a major calamity and reboot the past. However, when confronted with modern day evidence of the problems with mono-culture and invasive species which threaten to unbalance whole ecosystems, they somehow fail to see that these survivors of this modern day Noah's ark are likely the vehicles of the new mono-culture and invasive species of our own making. Are we so important that our historical status-quo existence (e.g., the foods we enjoy from our childhood and furry animals we like to watch) trumps the natural development of the ecosystem, or should we learn to adapt or perish as nearly all other species under the sun?
I don't think we ask these types of questions enough. Certainly we have done quite a bit of homo-forming of our planet (e.g., dams, farming, agriculture, mining, industry) over the millennia to get where we are today, but should attempting to recapture the past really be a goal? Or are we just introspectively thrashing ourselves with self-hate for currently/temporarily being at the top of the food chain of our planet? With great power comes great responsibility, but on the other hand is this chant the new "white-man's burden"?
This stuff "just happens" over the course of literally millions of years(from your own links). Not a couple hundred.
I was not assigning fault or commenting on timescales or any coincidences, but pointing out this is likely spilled milk at this point.
Our species will need to adapt to survive, there is no going back to pre-industrial times (or even staying at 1990 carbon levels, as if that would have helped). These things eventually happen and we will need to deal with it eventually.
Note that a few methane plumes is not going to do anything on the timescales of my lifetime either (as many scientists have pointed out, this magnitude of methane plumes are likely to be eaten by bacteria before it gets into the atmosphere), but if large scale methane calthrate deposits (which these are not) were to actually to start a massive release at this point, there's not much we can do about it
Unless I'm mistaken, we really don't have much ability to control things on a geological level yet (and no blowing up all our thermonuclear arsenals to create nuclear winter does not qualify as control, it's basically an uncontrolled experiment). It may be premature to say that any efforts will likely be futile at this point because little is known about this phenomena in specific or climates in general, but it seems to me like we are at the mercy of our planet on this topic (as we always were)...
Society is collectively out of their damn minds. Pretty soon sneezing in public will almost certainly be considered a biological weapon attack, because Ebola!!!...arrest and solitary him immediately!
Not sneezing itself, but saying "bless you" when someone else sneezes will get you suspended, but shutter to think what would happen if someone said "god is great" when someone sneezed...
Knowing the right people basically requires being in the right place at the right time. For example, choosing one university over another and having your friends intersect with just the right set of people to land you a job. Or meeting a person who just happens to know someone else in a party you are introduced to giving you a tip about joining a startup. Taking the same exercise class at a gym and with someone that knows someone you do can do business with. Choosing to live in one apartment vs another and having a specific neighbor...
In a similar vein, during one conversation I had with my soon to be father-inlaw, he asked me if I could choose, would I be lucky or smart. I told him if I could choose, I would be lucky.
He was quite surprised by my answer, as he expected the typical Chinese answer of being smart (presumably so I could make more money). However, I told him if I could actually choose, smart people are merely a dime a dozen, but lucky people are far more rare if not completely statistically impossible and to choose that would be much more valuable...
After hearing my answer, I think he recognized the wisdom of this choice.
Google writes the software for the car Google writes (or pays someone else to write) the simulator Google runs the test Google reports the results
Seems like with simulations we would be somehow implicitly trusting google that their simulator sufficiently models reality vs only modeling what the self driving software expected...
Although simulation has its place to improve testability during training and development, how does this test against reality? The reason to test against reality is generally to cover the stuff that you *didn't* expect. It's generally quite easy to fool yourself (and others) that something is good enough if you remove this link back to reality...
2. Eat a healthy diet... Although making healthy selections at the grocery store and at mealtime can't guarantee cancer prevention, it might help reduce your risk.
3. Maintain a healthy weight and be physically active... Maintaining a healthy weight mightlower the risk of various types of cancer
For HepB sure, for HPV, the jury is still out as "Most infections with high-risk HPVs do not cause cancer. Many HPV infections go away on their own within 1 to 2 years. However, infections that last for many years increase a person’s risk of developing cancer..."
6. Avoid risky behaviors...
Like unprotected sex and sharing intravenous needles? Cancer is only a minor reason not do partake in these activities....
7. Get regular medical care...
Actual screening for cancer has only been clinically shown to be effective for breast, lung, colon and cervical cancer. This doesn't actually prevent cancer, only increased the odds of catching it before it becomes serious.
For some people, they tend to strongly advocate these things because it is what they do anyhow. As for the science behind a list like this, the science somewhat vague. Other than stopping smoking and getting your vaccinations, (one reducing environmental exposure and the HepB issue), it's a mixed bag when it comes to science.
The whole thing about eating health is that we really don't know what the hell we are talking about yet. First it's low fat, then it's low sugar, then eating cholesterol is bad, then we find out there's only a minimal relationship to the cholesterol we eat, and then we find out that there's good and bad cholesterol and then it doesn't really show a strong correlation.... Then vitamins good, then vitamins bad... Exercise good, too much exercise bad...
Of course, the answer is not to eat cheeseburgers and not exercise, the take away is to don't take all this crap on the internet as gospel, and all things in moderation, right?;^)
Actually, it is unknown if these (or any things) reduce any specific persons' chance of getting non-environmental** forms cancer. At best, it is only shown by correlation, and as you know correlation is not causation, it is only an average risk profile, because we do not yet know what causes most cancers, so we do not know how to prevent it. The tip off that this is pseudo-science is the copious use of the hedging word "might" in your linked article...
Most diseases are simply treated (aka managed). A few can be cured (so that you no longer have that condition) like a bacterial infection. It may be the case that cancer is only treatable because potential cures would require changing or suppressing fundamental biochemical processes that evolved into our bodily systems (and can't be simply changed or suppressed w/o a radical redesign of our biochemical system).
I'm totally making this up, but if cancer processes were to be discovered to be mostly a function of a rapid partially undifferentiated cell division pathway that occurs when you are a blastosphere that was partly reused in the process to heal skin break or say white-blood cell production etc, etc, it wouldn't be simple to just disable this in your dna before you were born (as that would kill embryotic development). It also wouldn't be safe to disable it completely later because many other things depended on it. The fact that a certain biochemical process must be present to exist in the first place, may have resulted in our evolutionary path relying on the underlying mechanism for many other processes in a deeply nested and intertwined way that might be near impossible to for us to untangle. This may mean that cancer will never really be cured, only treated/managed.
On the flip side, if it were some sort of mutation, or dna methlyization that no critical biochemical system relies on (because it wasn't part of a deep evolutionary pathway), it might be straightforward to just screen for it, or modify dna replication processes to eliminate it, or develop some inhibiting/methlyization factor to markup the dna to avoid the process altogether. That might be considered a cure for cancer.
Today when we say someone is "cured" of cancer, we are really not being honest. The person survived the treatment and they appear to be cancer free for a period of time. The fact is that since we did not actually cure the cancer, it could go out of remission and require more treatment (sadly for some people I knew this unfortunately is not an unlikely outcome).
Of course having a "cure" might be semantical, as a lifetime of management could render it to less critical status (say like type1 diabetes), but if the underlying triggers are part of a multitude of critical biochemical process (because of evolution) it may prove to be quite hard to even have an effective treatment to manage cancer in difficult cases (and/or the side-effects could be pretty bad).
If you mean the quality of code that gets churned by your average coder, then yes, it is just like plumbing.
At least a plumber's work is often assembled from standard parts and inspected before it's sealed up behind a wall never to see the light again. Sometimes I wish the code I've had to troubleshoot was assembled from standard parts and gotten a minimal once-over before going into production...
Our forklift drivers had to go through a 2 week certification course, with obstacle courses on several different forklifts that we had in service, plus recurring yearly testing. It was a "prestige" job on the floor.
On the flip side, one summer job when I was a teenager, I was a working in a high-tech fortune 100 company's warehouse (which shall remain nameless) and my manager decided to send me to fork-lift "school" so I could help out loading the trucks. His sole word of advice to me was that the last guy to put the forks through the walls of his office got fired on the spot, so don't screw up.
The "school" was a 2 day hands-on where I got to attempt to drive 2 different styles of forklifts for about 20mins each and watch an OSHA approved fire extinguisher operation video. I spend the rest of the summer trying not to destroy things in the warehouse.
It was pretty prestigious job for a teenager, but I was getting slightly above minimum wage for that job...
Yes and no-- Depends on what the ISS's orbit is. If it has a circumpolar orbit, (crosses the polar region), then it will pass through the magnetic field lines that funnel cosmic particles into the atmosphere that cause the northern lights. EG-- it would get beamed pretty intensely with concentrated cosmic particles.
If it does not have that kind of orbit, and instead stays around the equator, then no so much. Mostly radiation free, compared to outside the magnetosphere.
What we need to do, is send a lander to the moon loaded with some microbial and planktonic colonies, where it can get beamed by high intensity, raw solar wind radiation, (And more importantly, where we can keep close tabs on it easily) and measure how the colonies do over time.
The 50-100 organisms survived launch, space vacuum, 3 years of radiation exposure, deep-freeze at an average temperature of only 20 degrees above absolute zero, and no nutrient, water or energy source. (The United States landed 5 Surveyors on the Moon; Surveyor 3 was the only one of the Surveyors visited by any of the six Apollo landings. No other life forms were found in soil samples retrieved by the Apollo missions or by two Soviet unmanned sampling missions, although amino acids - not necessarily of biological origin - were found in soil retrieved by the Apollo astronauts.)
If it were only just getting a few grams of tritium, it isn't that hard to do. On the scale of a few grams you can just get something like this baby and hide it in a commercial seawater desalinization plant to get a few grams after a bit of time (and energy)...
Of course that isn't the most economical way to do it. I think a common military-industrial method today is to put lithium control rods into an experimental-sized fission reactor and collect the tritium gas that comes off... Still no fusion necessary...
AFAIK, the ISS is still inside the van allen belt which means it isn't even subject to medium-level of cosmic radiation (experienced by the Apollo missions), yet alone hard cosmic interstellar radiation (when you get out into Voyager distances)...
...when it became known that the US were bugging her phone. Probably her reaction was "What's the hubbub, it's not like we don't...".
Of course when things like this become public, you have to make a good show, though... Feigning outrage and going viral. Isn't that what the modern internet is all about?
Sadly, you do not have the absolute right to record what you see. For instance being in your hotel room and having someone film you from a peephole in the door. Even though you might be able to see it when you are standing in a public place, you have no right to record what you can see.
If the subject of the photography is in public (as opposed to a publically accessible, but privately owned place), courts have basically ruled the subjects have no expectation of privacy, so most photographic recording is fair game. This is how paparazzi get many of their photos legally...
If the photographer is in a non-public area (e.g., the publically accessible, but privately owned hotel hallway), courts have ruled that public access rules do not apply.
The grey area is when the subject is in a non-public area, but the photographer is in a public area (e.g., a drone in "public" airspace, above a private residence).
AFAIK and IANAL, the line is generally drawn that invasion of privacy requires a recording device of some sort in these situations. It stems from the idea that invasion of privacy requires the publicizing of private life of an individual that is offensive to a "reasonable" person and/or not of legitimate concern to the public. I suppose w/o a recording device, you often cannot effectively publicize it so it falls outside typical invasion scope... And of course the definitions of "offensive" and "reasonable" are generally left up to the courts to decide...
In fairness, there are at least two ways that could happen: 1) MS bribes people to complain. Unlikely, but not impossible. 2) MS bribes the relevant officials to *say* there have been overwhelming complaints. I mean, there are inevitably going to be complaints; that happens any time *anything* changes. The question is at what point they become important enough to sway the overall decision.
With that said, I suspect you're right.
OR
3) MS originally bribed officials to attempt to force ordinary people to Linux desktops knowing they would eventually complain enough to make the whole experiment fail and spin a cautionary for any that follow...
If a quality project can't raise money elsewhere from more traditional fund-raising sources, might this indicate a subtle case of pre-selection quality bias instead of an indication of any anything to do with kickstarter campaign odds?
It could simply confirm that woman entrepreneurs often have less access to traditional funding sources because their industry contact lists are shorter in certain industries (which may or may not have anything to do with positive specific gender bias on kickstarter).
This is also consistent with the fact that in industries that tend to have more even female representation, they apparently lost the bias they were measuring...
I guess you can spin the results anyway you want...
Single isotope silicon? Silicon wafers surfaces (where the transistors are) are generally doped with ions using diffusion and etched, and the most serious defects are usually parametric due to patterning issues. We've go a long ways to go before actually isotope purity is going to be a limiting factor...
Conductivity of gold vs copper? Copper is a better conductor than gold (although silver is a better conductor than both of them). The reason that gold is used for *connections* is that it is more malleable than copper allowing it to make a more robust physical connection. For conduction, copper or silver is much better. The reason that silver isn't used today is that the processes needed to etch it are their infancy. Also, there's a reluctance to go there, because it's known that silver is much more prone to electro-migration issues than copper and the gain in conductivity is relatively small (compared from the step between aluminum and copper).
Also, silicon on insulator isn't w/o problems. The main problems today are the floating-body problem** which will likely render SOI impractical for devices that need high frequency switching (e.g, a CPU) in future process nodes. This is why after a brief commercial taste of this technology, many companies are moving away from it except for specialty products (like Z-ram).
Also, if your assertion is true that insulators don't conduct heat (very well), now you can't get heat away from one hemisphere of your circuit (instead of heat conducting up and down). Wouldn't that tend to make more problems than it solves?
**As I understand it, in bulk silicon, there is a leakage path that bleeds the capacitance away, but on an insulator, the body of a transistor is effectively a large parasitic capacitor. Failure to fully discharge the transistor body after switching creates somewhat of a memory effect limiting performance and potentially causing a parasitic transistors to drain floating nodes (e.g., in latches and xor-gates) in a operational sequence indeterminate way influenced by neighboring transistors. This makes it hard to margin for and may ultimately make it unworkable to obtain the tolerances needed for high speed design.
200mV likely comes from a generic analysis of CMOS on Silicon wafer oxide assuming you don't want a leakage factor more than 50% the current (most of which comes from the subthreshold conduction current) and you don't do any weird body-biasing techniques (which would consume lots of circuit area). It isn't a hard number but a general ballpark. Since everyone is scaling down the supply voltage, we must also scale down the threshold voltage and then the amount a signal is below the threshold voltage when you are 'off' is now conducting at a level that is a significant fraction of when it is 'on' meaning the device no longer has much noise margin to work reliability at all.
Of course with different insulators and conduction semiconductors and transistor types and tolerance for leakage and reliability this will be different.
Moore's Law is "the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit doubles every two years". You can accomplish that by halving the size of the transistors, or by doubling the size of the chip. Some element of the latter is already happening - AMD and Nvidia put out a second generation of chips on the 28nm node, with greatly increased die sizes but similar pricing. The reliability and cost of the process node had improved enough that they could get a 50% improvement over the last gen at a similar price point, despite using essentially the same transistor size.
Bad example, the initial yield on 28nm was so bad that the initial pricing was hugely impacted by wafer shortages. Many fabless customers reverted to the 40nm node to wait it out. TSMC eventually got things sorted out so now 28nm has reasonable yields.
Right now, the next node is looking even worse. TSMC isn't counting on the yield-times-cost of their next gen process to *ever* get to the point when it crosses over 28nm pricing per transistor (for typical designs). Given that reality, it will likely only make sense to go to the newer processes if you need its lower-power features, but you will pay a premium for that. The days of free transistors with a new node appear to be numbered until they make some radical manufacturing breakthroughs to improve the economics (which they might eventually do, but it currently isn't on anyone's roadmap down to 10nm). Silicon architects need to now get smarter, as they likely won't have many more transistors to work with at a given product price point.
If memory-bound problems start becoming a priority (and transistors get cheap enough), we might see a shift back from DRAM to SRAM for main memory.
Given the above situation, and that fast SRAMs tend to be quite a bit larger than fast DRAMs (6T vs 1T+C) and the basic fact that the limitation is currently the interface to the memory device, not the memory technology, a shift back to SRAM seems mighty unlikely.
The next "big-thing" in the memory front is probably WIDEIO2 (the original wideio1 didn't get many adopters). Instead of connecting an SoC (all processors are basically SoC's these days) to a DRAM chip, you put the DRAM and SoC in the same package (either stacked with through silicon vias or side-by-side in a multi-chip package). Since the interface doesn't need to go on the board, you can have many more wire to connect the two, and each wire will have lower capacitance which will increase the available bandwidth to the memory device.
So just why would alpha particles (which are basically a helium nucleus consisting of 4 really heavy particles) gonna be somehow faster than electrons (which are much lighter and take less energy to manipulate)?
Another problem is that we aren't currently using free-space electrons either, but electrons in a wave guide (where we lay down conductors to steer the electrons around the circuits we design). Not as easy to do with alpha particles...
It may be affordable and walkable, but would you actually want to walk there?
I've always been weary when I took the RTD to the light rail station there at night and the crime statistics tend to bear this caution. Not to say it might not be some sort of up-and-coming neighborhood (don't live in Denver now so my information is a few years old), but historically, that's been fits-and-starts for that area with little progress since the '90s even though downtown was getting all the ball-park redevelopment...
On the other hand Capitol Hill in Seattle doesn't seem nearly as bad. It isn't the greatest neighborhood and although I don't generally wander around that area at night when I travel to Seattle (although I did occasionally drive by there because I know someone who used to have a restaurant there). I wonder how much crime got factored into this so-called walkability "math"... I'm a bit suspect of this WalkScore anyhow as it yields very unexpected ratings for the last few places that I lived...
Slashdot Mirror
Motivation to preserve? There's really no good motivation for preserving DNA other than historical preservation. Think of this like preserving the source code for apple //e prodos. The ecosystem which that source code was valuable has been long lost, probably never to come again. Newer source code that serves a similar ecological niche in the new eco-system will evolve and probably be better than it ever was.
Some people seem to be obsessed with a philosophy no different than modern day Noah's ark where we somehow survive a major calamity and reboot the past. However, when confronted with modern day evidence of the problems with mono-culture and invasive species which threaten to unbalance whole ecosystems, they somehow fail to see that these survivors of this modern day Noah's ark are likely the vehicles of the new mono-culture and invasive species of our own making. Are we so important that our historical status-quo existence (e.g., the foods we enjoy from our childhood and furry animals we like to watch) trumps the natural development of the ecosystem, or should we learn to adapt or perish as nearly all other species under the sun?
I don't think we ask these types of questions enough. Certainly we have done quite a bit of homo-forming of our planet (e.g., dams, farming, agriculture, mining, industry) over the millennia to get where we are today, but should attempting to recapture the past really be a goal? Or are we just introspectively thrashing ourselves with self-hate for currently/temporarily being at the top of the food chain of our planet? With great power comes great responsibility, but on the other hand is this chant the new "white-man's burden"?
This stuff "just happens" over the course of literally millions of years(from your own links). Not a couple hundred.
I was not assigning fault or commenting on timescales or any coincidences, but pointing out this is likely spilled milk at this point.
Our species will need to adapt to survive, there is no going back to pre-industrial times (or even staying at 1990 carbon levels, as if that would have helped). These things eventually happen and we will need to deal with it eventually.
Note that a few methane plumes is not going to do anything on the timescales of my lifetime either (as many scientists have pointed out, this magnitude of methane plumes are likely to be eaten by bacteria before it gets into the atmosphere), but if large scale methane calthrate deposits (which these are not) were to actually to start a massive release at this point, there's not much we can do about it
Unless I'm mistaken, we really don't have much ability to control things on a geological level yet (and no blowing up all our thermonuclear arsenals to create nuclear winter does not qualify as control, it's basically an uncontrolled experiment). It may be premature to say that any efforts will likely be futile at this point because little is known about this phenomena in specific or climates in general, but it seems to me like we are at the mercy of our planet on this topic (as we always were)...
We really really really don't want this.
We really really really don't have a choice, do we?
Historically, this stuff just happens...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...
Society is collectively out of their damn minds. Pretty soon sneezing in public will almost certainly be considered a biological weapon attack, because Ebola!!!...arrest and solitary him immediately!
Not sneezing itself, but saying "bless you" when someone else sneezes will get you suspended, but shutter to think what would happen if someone said "god is great" when someone sneezed...
Knowing the right people basically requires being in the right place at the right time. For example, choosing one university over another and having your friends intersect with just the right set of people to land you a job. Or meeting a person who just happens to know someone else in a party you are introduced to giving you a tip about joining a startup. Taking the same exercise class at a gym and with someone that knows someone you do can do business with. Choosing to live in one apartment vs another and having a specific neighbor...
In a similar vein, during one conversation I had with my soon to be father-inlaw, he asked me if I could choose, would I be lucky or smart. I told him if I could choose, I would be lucky.
He was quite surprised by my answer, as he expected the typical Chinese answer of being smart (presumably so I could make more money). However, I told him if I could actually choose, smart people are merely a dime a dozen, but lucky people are far more rare if not completely statistically impossible and to choose that would be much more valuable...
After hearing my answer, I think he recognized the wisdom of this choice.
Let's see if...
Google writes the software for the car
Google writes (or pays someone else to write) the simulator
Google runs the test
Google reports the results
Seems like with simulations we would be somehow implicitly trusting google that their simulator sufficiently models reality vs only modeling what the self driving software expected...
Although simulation has its place to improve testability during training and development, how does this test against reality? The reason to test against reality is generally to cover the stuff that you *didn't* expect. It's generally quite easy to fool yourself (and others) that something is good enough if you remove this link back to reality...
Let's see here what we have here...
1.Don't use tobacco...
Okay that one has some science behind it...
2. Eat a healthy diet... Although making healthy selections at the grocery store and at mealtime can't guarantee cancer prevention, it might help reduce your risk.
3. Maintain a healthy weight and be physically active... Maintaining a healthy weight might lower the risk of various types of cancer
4. Protect yourself from the sun
Apparently they didn't get the news that apparently sunscreen doesn't help
5. Get immunized...
For HepB sure, for HPV, the jury is still out as "Most infections with high-risk HPVs do not cause cancer. Many HPV infections go away on their own within 1 to 2 years. However, infections that last for many years increase a person’s risk of developing cancer..."
6. Avoid risky behaviors...
Like unprotected sex and sharing intravenous needles? Cancer is only a minor reason not do partake in these activities....
7. Get regular medical care...
Actual screening for cancer has only been clinically shown to be effective for breast, lung, colon and cervical cancer. This doesn't actually prevent cancer, only increased the odds of catching it before it becomes serious.
For some people, they tend to strongly advocate these things because it is what they do anyhow. As for the science behind a list like this, the science somewhat vague. Other than stopping smoking and getting your vaccinations, (one reducing environmental exposure and the HepB issue), it's a mixed bag when it comes to science.
The whole thing about eating health is that we really don't know what the hell we are talking about yet. First it's low fat, then it's low sugar, then eating cholesterol is bad, then we find out there's only a minimal relationship to the cholesterol we eat, and then we find out that there's good and bad cholesterol and then it doesn't really show a strong correlation.... Then vitamins good, then vitamins bad... Exercise good, too much exercise bad...
Of course, the answer is not to eat cheeseburgers and not exercise, the take away is to don't take all this crap on the internet as gospel, and all things in moderation, right? ;^)
Actually, it is unknown if these (or any things) reduce any specific persons' chance of getting non-environmental** forms cancer.
At best, it is only shown by correlation, and as you know correlation is not causation, it is only an average risk profile, because we do not yet know what causes most cancers, so we do not know how to prevent it. The tip off that this is pseudo-science is the copious use of the hedging word "might" in your linked article...
** as opposed to cancers like mesothelioma
Most diseases are simply treated (aka managed). A few can be cured (so that you no longer have that condition) like a bacterial infection. It may be the case that cancer is only treatable because potential cures would require changing or suppressing fundamental biochemical processes that evolved into our bodily systems (and can't be simply changed or suppressed w/o a radical redesign of our biochemical system).
I'm totally making this up, but if cancer processes were to be discovered to be mostly a function of a rapid partially undifferentiated cell division pathway that occurs when you are a blastosphere that was partly reused in the process to heal skin break or say white-blood cell production etc, etc, it wouldn't be simple to just disable this in your dna before you were born (as that would kill embryotic development). It also wouldn't be safe to disable it completely later because many other things depended on it. The fact that a certain biochemical process must be present to exist in the first place, may have resulted in our evolutionary path relying on the underlying mechanism for many other processes in a deeply nested and intertwined way that might be near impossible to for us to untangle. This may mean that cancer will never really be cured, only treated/managed.
On the flip side, if it were some sort of mutation, or dna methlyization that no critical biochemical system relies on (because it wasn't part of a deep evolutionary pathway), it might be straightforward to just screen for it, or modify dna replication processes to eliminate it, or develop some inhibiting/methlyization factor to markup the dna to avoid the process altogether. That might be considered a cure for cancer.
Today when we say someone is "cured" of cancer, we are really not being honest. The person survived the treatment and they appear to be cancer free for a period of time. The fact is that since we did not actually cure the cancer, it could go out of remission and require more treatment (sadly for some people I knew this unfortunately is not an unlikely outcome).
Of course having a "cure" might be semantical, as a lifetime of management could render it to less critical status (say like type1 diabetes), but if the underlying triggers are part of a multitude of critical biochemical process (because of evolution) it may prove to be quite hard to even have an effective treatment to manage cancer in difficult cases (and/or the side-effects could be pretty bad).
If you mean the quality of code that gets churned by your average coder, then yes, it is just like plumbing.
At least a plumber's work is often assembled from standard parts and inspected before it's sealed up behind a wall never to see the light again.
Sometimes I wish the code I've had to troubleshoot was assembled from standard parts and gotten a minimal once-over before going into production...
hmm... people in low-cost countries should start studying US law, so they can give cheap legal-advice :)
Not cheaper than the free legal-advice given on /. ;^)
Our forklift drivers had to go through a 2 week certification course, with obstacle courses on several different forklifts that we had in service, plus recurring yearly testing. It was a "prestige" job on the floor.
On the flip side, one summer job when I was a teenager, I was a working in a high-tech fortune 100 company's warehouse (which shall remain nameless) and my manager decided to send me to fork-lift "school" so I could help out loading the trucks. His sole word of advice to me was that the last guy to put the forks through the walls of his office got fired on the spot, so don't screw up.
The "school" was a 2 day hands-on where I got to attempt to drive 2 different styles of forklifts for about 20mins each and watch an OSHA approved fire extinguisher operation video. I spend the rest of the summer trying not to destroy things in the warehouse.
It was pretty prestigious job for a teenager, but I was getting slightly above minimum wage for that job...
Yes and no-- Depends on what the ISS's orbit is. If it has a circumpolar orbit, (crosses the polar region), then it will pass through the magnetic field lines that funnel cosmic particles into the atmosphere that cause the northern lights. EG-- it would get beamed pretty intensely with concentrated cosmic particles.
If it does not have that kind of orbit, and instead stays around the equator, then no so much. Mostly radiation free, compared to outside the magnetosphere.
ISS orbit track here... Quite equatorial...
What we need to do, is send a lander to the moon loaded with some microbial and planktonic colonies, where it can get beamed by high intensity, raw solar wind radiation, (And more importantly, where we can keep close tabs on it easily) and measure how the colonies do over time.
Accidentally did that back in '67 with Surveyor 3...
The 50-100 organisms survived launch, space vacuum, 3 years of radiation exposure, deep-freeze at an average temperature of only 20 degrees above absolute zero, and no nutrient, water or energy source. (The United States landed 5 Surveyors on the Moon; Surveyor 3 was the only one of the Surveyors visited by any of the six Apollo landings. No other life forms were found in soil samples retrieved by the Apollo missions or by two Soviet unmanned sampling missions, although amino acids - not necessarily of biological origin - were found in soil retrieved by the Apollo astronauts.)
If it were only just getting a few grams of tritium, it isn't that hard to do. On the scale of a few grams you can just get something like this baby and hide it in a commercial seawater desalinization plant to get a few grams after a bit of time (and energy)...
Of course that isn't the most economical way to do it. I think a common military-industrial method today is to put lithium control rods into an experimental-sized fission reactor and collect the tritium gas that comes off... Still no fusion necessary...
AFAIK, the ISS is still inside the van allen belt which means it isn't even subject to medium-level of cosmic radiation (experienced by the Apollo missions), yet alone hard cosmic interstellar radiation (when you get out into Voyager distances)...
...when it became known that the US were bugging her phone. Probably her reaction was "What's the hubbub, it's not like we don't...".
Of course when things like this become public, you have to make a good show, though...
Feigning outrage and going viral. Isn't that what the modern internet is all about?
I also have the right to record what I see.
Sadly, you do not have the absolute right to record what you see. For instance being in your hotel room and having someone film you from a peephole in the door. Even though you might be able to see it when you are standing in a public place, you have no right to record what you can see.
If the subject of the photography is in public (as opposed to a publically accessible, but privately owned place), courts have basically ruled the subjects have no expectation of privacy, so most photographic recording is fair game. This is how paparazzi get many of their photos legally...
If the photographer is in a non-public area (e.g., the publically accessible, but privately owned hotel hallway), courts have ruled that public access rules do not apply.
The grey area is when the subject is in a non-public area, but the photographer is in a public area (e.g., a drone in "public" airspace, above a private residence).
AFAIK and IANAL, the line is generally drawn that invasion of privacy requires a recording device of some sort in these situations. It stems from the idea that invasion of privacy requires the publicizing of private life of an individual that is offensive to a "reasonable" person and/or not of legitimate concern to the public. I suppose w/o a recording device, you often cannot effectively publicize it so it falls outside typical invasion scope... And of course the definitions of "offensive" and "reasonable" are generally left up to the courts to decide...
In fairness, there are at least two ways that could happen:
1) MS bribes people to complain. Unlikely, but not impossible.
2) MS bribes the relevant officials to *say* there have been overwhelming complaints. I mean, there are inevitably going to be complaints; that happens any time *anything* changes. The question is at what point they become important enough to sway the overall decision.
With that said, I suspect you're right.
OR
3) MS originally bribed officials to attempt to force ordinary people to Linux desktops knowing they would eventually complain enough to make the whole experiment fail and spin a cautionary for any that follow...
Or maybe not... ;^)
If a quality project can't raise money elsewhere from more traditional fund-raising sources, might this indicate a subtle case of pre-selection quality bias instead of an indication of any anything to do with kickstarter campaign odds?
It could simply confirm that woman entrepreneurs often have less access to traditional funding sources because their industry contact lists are shorter in certain industries (which may or may not have anything to do with positive specific gender bias on kickstarter).
This is also consistent with the fact that in industries that tend to have more even female representation, they apparently lost the bias they were measuring...
I guess you can spin the results anyway you want...
Next thing you know they'll start practicing buddhism...
Single isotope silicon? Silicon wafers surfaces (where the transistors are) are generally doped with ions using diffusion and etched, and the most serious defects are usually parametric due to patterning issues. We've go a long ways to go before actually isotope purity is going to be a limiting factor...
Conductivity of gold vs copper? Copper is a better conductor than gold (although silver is a better conductor than both of them). The reason that gold is used for *connections* is that it is more malleable than copper allowing it to make a more robust physical connection. For conduction, copper or silver is much better. The reason that silver isn't used today is that the processes needed to etch it are their infancy. Also, there's a reluctance to go there, because it's known that silver is much more prone to electro-migration issues than copper and the gain in conductivity is relatively small (compared from the step between aluminum and copper).
Also, silicon on insulator isn't w/o problems. The main problems today are the floating-body problem** which will likely render SOI impractical for devices that need high frequency switching (e.g, a CPU) in future process nodes. This is why after a brief commercial taste of this technology, many companies are moving away from it except for specialty products (like Z-ram).
Also, if your assertion is true that insulators don't conduct heat (very well), now you can't get heat away from one hemisphere of your circuit (instead of heat conducting up and down). Wouldn't that tend to make more problems than it solves?
**As I understand it, in bulk silicon, there is a leakage path that bleeds the capacitance away, but on an insulator, the body of a transistor is effectively a large parasitic capacitor. Failure to fully discharge the transistor body after switching creates somewhat of a memory effect limiting performance and potentially causing a parasitic transistors to drain floating nodes (e.g., in latches and xor-gates) in a operational sequence indeterminate way influenced by neighboring transistors. This makes it hard to margin for and may ultimately make it unworkable to obtain the tolerances needed for high speed design.
200mV likely comes from a generic analysis of CMOS on Silicon wafer oxide assuming you don't want a leakage factor more than 50% the current (most of which comes from the subthreshold conduction current) and you don't do any weird body-biasing techniques (which would consume lots of circuit area). It isn't a hard number but a general ballpark. Since everyone is scaling down the supply voltage, we must also scale down the threshold voltage and then the amount a signal is below the threshold voltage when you are 'off' is now conducting at a level that is a significant fraction of when it is 'on' meaning the device no longer has much noise margin to work reliability at all.
Of course with different insulators and conduction semiconductors and transistor types and tolerance for leakage and reliability this will be different.
Moore's Law is "the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit doubles every two years". You can accomplish that by halving the size of the transistors, or by doubling the size of the chip. Some element of the latter is already happening - AMD and Nvidia put out a second generation of chips on the 28nm node, with greatly increased die sizes but similar pricing. The reliability and cost of the process node had improved enough that they could get a 50% improvement over the last gen at a similar price point, despite using essentially the same transistor size.
Bad example, the initial yield on 28nm was so bad that the initial pricing was hugely impacted by wafer shortages. Many fabless customers reverted to the 40nm node to wait it out. TSMC eventually got things sorted out so now 28nm has reasonable yields.
Right now, the next node is looking even worse. TSMC isn't counting on the yield-times-cost of their next gen process to *ever* get to the point when it crosses over 28nm pricing per transistor (for typical designs). Given that reality, it will likely only make sense to go to the newer processes if you need its lower-power features, but you will pay a premium for that. The days of free transistors with a new node appear to be numbered until they make some radical manufacturing breakthroughs to improve the economics (which they might eventually do, but it currently isn't on anyone's roadmap down to 10nm). Silicon architects need to now get smarter, as they likely won't have many more transistors to work with at a given product price point.
If memory-bound problems start becoming a priority (and transistors get cheap enough), we might see a shift back from DRAM to SRAM for main memory.
Given the above situation, and that fast SRAMs tend to be quite a bit larger than fast DRAMs (6T vs 1T+C) and the basic fact that the limitation is currently the interface to the memory device, not the memory technology, a shift back to SRAM seems mighty unlikely.
The next "big-thing" in the memory front is probably WIDEIO2 (the original wideio1 didn't get many adopters). Instead of connecting an SoC (all processors are basically SoC's these days) to a DRAM chip, you put the DRAM and SoC in the same package (either stacked with through silicon vias or side-by-side in a multi-chip package). Since the interface doesn't need to go on the board, you can have many more wire to connect the two, and each wire will have lower capacitance which will increase the available bandwidth to the memory device.
So just why would alpha particles (which are basically a helium nucleus consisting of 4 really heavy particles) gonna be somehow faster than electrons (which are much lighter and take less energy to manipulate)?
Another problem is that we aren't currently using free-space electrons either, but electrons in a wave guide (where we lay down conductors to steer the electrons around the circuits we design). Not as easy to do with alpha particles...
It may be affordable and walkable, but would you actually want to walk there?
I've always been weary when I took the RTD to the light rail station there at night and the crime statistics tend to bear this caution. Not to say it might not be some sort of up-and-coming neighborhood (don't live in Denver now so my information is a few years old), but historically, that's been fits-and-starts for that area with little progress since the '90s even though downtown was getting all the ball-park redevelopment...
On the other hand Capitol Hill in Seattle doesn't seem nearly as bad. It isn't the greatest neighborhood and although I don't generally wander around that area at night when I travel to Seattle (although I did occasionally drive by there because I know someone who used to have a restaurant there). I wonder how much crime got factored into this so-called walkability "math"... I'm a bit suspect of this WalkScore anyhow as it yields very unexpected ratings for the last few places that I lived...