France tried decimal time after the French revolution (each day had 10 hours, 100 minutes/hour, 100 seconds/minute)...
They also tried a wacky calendar: 12-month year, 30 days/month each consisting of 10-day "weeks".
Perhaps the whole thing failed because their scheme only suggested 1/10 days of rest instead of 1/7 (because 2/10 was too much historically). Given the current French employment situation, perhaps 3/10 days off is better than 2/7?
If energy became essentially "free", it might be possible for a small number of well financed crazy people to hoarde/concentrate enough energy to cause an event that created enough damage to make the earth uninhabitable. That would be a bad scenaro.
If they're dealing with AMD, I think they mean 45nm.
As I recall, AMD started their march away from global foundaries and started using TSMC for their original Fusion chips at the 40nm bulk CMOS node and Microsoft has historically fabed at TSMC, so there's no reason to doubt that the XboxOne SOC is a 40nm chip fabbed at TSMC.
Although the 28nm node is currently the most advanced process TSMC has in production, it is currently severely wafer start constrained (Qualcomm, AMD, Nvidia, are all big customers chewing up all spare capacity), so TSMC's "N-1" 40nm node is probably easier to ramp a product in if you need large production capacity by christmas and you don't care too much about die size... AFAIK, TSMC's 40nm node is just the "shrink" of their 45nm node, so their isn't any compelling reason to use 45nm for a new design unless you wanted to just have bigger chips with fewer chips on each wafer and more defects***
***you would typically only run a 45nm process if you had millions of dollars of chip reticles sitting around and you wanted to make a few more chips w/o making new reticles for 40nm..
Is it normal for the carrier to not outright buy the phone until they sell it?
I don't know about phones, but in the distribution world, it is very common for a reseller to not actually buy a product before it is sold.
Many companies these days work on a virtual inventory basis with their primary supply chain. The basic idea is that the seller of the product effectively leases space in the warehouse to the supplier with a contract such that the supplier agrees to maintain a certain amount of virtual inventory. When the seller sells-through a product, they don't actually have to pay for the inventory until the second the unit is "pulled" from this hub and then the supplier bills the seller and is on the hook to replenish this inventory. Of course the seller discontinues that product, then it just never pulls any more units from hub and the supplier is left holding the bag (even though the inventory is in the seller's warehouse). On the sale, the seller often still has "net-90" days to pay for it as well. As you can see, the life of the supplier isn't easy, nowdays they need to pay for both the inventory and the account receivables side...
For the inventory on the shelf there is a similar paradigm, as part of the shelf stocking agreement, a repurchase agreement is made that the seller can require the supplier to purchase back some or all of the inventory (although usually at a discounted rate), if the inventory hasn't been sold in a certain number of days. This type of stock/repurchase agreements happens in industries far and wide, supermarkets to bookseller to electronic's retailers.
The rationale for the seller offering a high repurchase price and percentages is for the seller and supplier to maximise the amount of product on the shelves (to prevent out-of-stock sales loss) given the seller's risk tolerance for the product. Of course the supplier may be irrational, but the seller is covered a bit in this case... Usually the seller says I'll risk $X to stock your product on the shelf and the agreement is structured by the supplier that although $Y of inventory is stocked, $Y - #units X repurchase_price = $X.
That's why so many "liberal" examinations of the issues have resulted to separating out "in-classroom" spending, but they are dismissed as inconvenient, and the numbers used by the school-haters are always total funding.
I'm curious how "rubber-room" spending is categorized? (fwiw, new york city statistically has one of the highest in-classroom spending ratios in the country)
FWIW, he's the same state senator that sponsored the bill to ban the sale of violent video games to minors, and has seemed to make harrassment of the video game biz his personal mission...
He's also sponsored legislation to ban any semi-automatics that have conversion kits... I suppose this is the next logical step for him since basically a 3d printer is the ultimate conversion kit.
Are universities teaching communicating sequential processes to undergraduates yet?
As an inmos refuge that was initially brainwashed by CSP, it's pretty clear that CSP isn't the only way to skin the concurrent code beast and not every thing that is taught as CSP is actually formal enough to be benefit from any of the CSP verification techniques (e.g., shared data structures are quite common in practical systems), so it has really devolved into more of a "meme" than a programming technique that is taught.
As a trivial example, simple server/client is at its surface a CSP-like programming paradigm, until you realize that underneath the database server, there's probably some ACID implementation stuff that can't really be taught the same way (since they usually rely on some sort of global locks which are difficult and not realistic components in a pure CSP analysis framework).
I liken CSP to OOP. Many claim to lament that the younglings aren't taught the proper way to apply OOP, but those people don't often look in the mirror, as they have devolved OOP into a meme consisting of a few coding guidelines rather than a way to be taught to think about code and potential latent bugs. Not to say that everyone should live and breathe CSP/OOP, but perhaps the most valuable part is just the memes and the coding guidelines (which can be learned quite quickly).
Insurance Company's would pay for this. The longer you live, the more money you can pay them.
Actually, I doubt it. The longer you live, the more likely you would be to experience an expensive condition which they would have to pay for. Insurance companies would ideally want you to pay whilst you are healthy and then die immediatly after contracting any expensive condition (before they have to pay too much). Chronic conditions where you continue to toil on and pay premiums lower than the cost to the company are probably the worst for insurance companies (although conversely it is the "best" case for the the drug companies).
For those that want a car analogy, this is kinda like how some people want to sell their cars before there are any (inevitable) serious repair costs associated with owning a car that is wearing out. Also, if there a serious incident, at some point, an insurance company would rather "total-out" the car than to actually pay for repair costs. In fact this idea used to be a common feature of health insurance policies (although I think that life-time maximums are no longer legal terms in health insurance policies in the US).
Although this study speculates that GDF-11 is the primary active agent, that information is unknown...
However, as we have discovered, blood is much more complicated that we think it is. Also, actual testing of blood substitutes on humans has been very controversial (since many have been unsuspecting/uninformed participants). For example, I doubt very many people remember PolyHeme... Here's and interesting snipet from the wiki...
The testing was completed at more than 25 Level I trauma centers in the United States under a Food and Drug Administration special category (21CFR 50.24) in 1996 that allows its use without patient consent in special circumstances. PolyHeme was the 15th such experiment allowed by the FDA. Although Northfield Laboratories came under scrutiny for this trial, enrollment of the 720 patient trial was completed on July 31, 2006. "Between 2003 and 2006, 720 trauma victims at thirty-two U.S. medical centers were "enrolled" in a research study to determine the efficacy of Polyheme, a patented blood substitute manufactured by Northfield Laboratories". [1]
The controversy arose from the fact that the participants in this study were incapable of giving their consent due to the nature of their injuries. The only way to opt out from the study was by wearing a special bracelet prior to needing emergency care (the bracelet can be requested by calling 717-531-5829). This practice is sanctioned by the FDA as necessary emergency research, but patients’ rights groups protested the study.
...another key attribute of applications executed in the browser is security. The browser has a consistant security footprint that I trust a lot more than I trust new applications.
I imagine that if we did statistics today on this, not only does much more malware exist in stuffs executed by the browser than from applications that they install, they are also much more likely to get malware from the browser vector than any other vector (because of compromised sites and random surfing).
Sure much of the malware payload isn't pure javascript, but many vulnerablities start there (e.g., xss, csrf, etc) and in the implementations of the "sandboxes" that browsers use to run the malware^H applets/plugins (like java).
I think you trust is misplaced in the current environment.
What this appears to be talking about is how at the airport they now swab your carry-on luggage and put it in a machine. I don't think these boston folks would have been though any "swabing" checkpoint so the existance of a device that did this probably would not have made anyone "safer" in this case (or any similar non-airport/govt-building checkpoint situation).
For those curious, the idea behind an IMS (ion mobility spectrometer), is that you ionize your sample (well sort of, you have water or other liquid vapor with ions dissolved in it, not just pure ions in air or in a vaccum) and waft them into a drift tube and use fact that these ionized vapors have slightly different masses so they have different mobility under an electric field. The "spectra" of the mobility under this electric field helps to identify the original chemicals in the swab.
The specific problem they are trying to solve with black powder is that the ions formed by Sulphur (atomic mass 32) and Oxygen (atomic mass 16) are very difficult to disambiguate for a clean detection signal (since O2n- and S1n- have about the same mass).
The common method of disamgibuating is to add solvents or chemical reagents before ionization. AFAIK, in the case of Oxygen interference, a common way to change the ionic signature is to add dichlorolmethane CH2CL2 and the resulting reaction usually exchanges O2- ions for CL- ions (which is enough different than sulphur ion to make it easy to detect), but unfortuantly, dichloromethane also has a side effect of inhibiting the formation of various Sulphur ion allotropes (i.e., different number of sulphur atoms in the ion). So these folks apparently came up with a technique where you ionize first (avoiding the problem with CH2CL2 and sulphur ion formation) and then pass all the ions through a CH2CL2 "titration region" in the drift tube (effectively replacing many of O2- ions that mask the sulphur ion signature with Cl- ions).
Of course the devil is in the details which I haven't read about yet...
That raises up the question of how can a supercomputer simulate what our species would do if it had access to a supercomputer that could simulate what our species would do if it had access to a supercomputer that could simulate... Out of memory [core dump] % rm -rf *
In case you didn't know, these "neo-nicotinoid" insectides are basically engineered substitutes for nicotine that affect insects more than people (as opposed to the normal nicotine that affects people more than insects). As I understand it, if an insect eats get too much of this chemical, their nervous systems basically stop working (it overloads certiain receptors so they stop propogating signals), and the insects become paralyzed and eventually they die. Apparently it doesn't get past the blood-brain barrier on most vertibrates, so it isn't too toxic to us (or so they say)...
Typically bees don't eat plants, so in theory they are affected less by this, but it seems plausible to me that bees would be affect by this as well as I imagine insectides cannot be applied perfectly, and sustained exposure can't be a good thing.
I have no idea how low-level exposure would affect a bee, but given how nicotine exposure affects humans, maybe there's something there...
Sadly, this isn't any different than a scam that some government contractors play.
In many government contracts, there are set-asides for women and/or minority owned businesses. Sometimes less than scrupulous goverment contractors set up shell companies that name a women and/or a minority as a principal owner (more often than not a wife of the owners of the original contractors) and bid on those contracts with set-asides to avoid competition and make more profit. Inevitably, some of the work come the way of the shell company, and these shell companies simply subcontract the actual work to the original shady governnment contractors at a non-competitive price and kick-back a finders fee of sorts to the principals of the shell company.
Government (and eventually the taxpayers) lose every day to these types of scams and you don't hear about them. The wake of the Sarah Hanson / Manti teo / Dora Ratjen style of scams is generally much smaller (although potentially more media tickling)
Although some folks call this energy source a metal-air "battery", since it has an anode and cathode and an electrolyte, in many situations, more like a metal-air fuel cell than a "battery" as its anode is consumed in a reaction that is not efficiently reversable from an energy point of view (if at all in some varients) and thus not rechargeable in the traditional sense of an automobile battery.
Of course, this doesn't make it unusable. In fact, quick mechanical replacemement of the fuel that stores the energy is the one big advantage of gasoline powered engines, that might be enabled by a metal-air fuel cell (you might be able to empty the old reactant and replace with new metal-air fuel pellets in filling station). But to say this is a battery technology does not really convey what is exciting about this technology.
He takes everyones estimate by 'pi'....In my exp he is right.
If your PM takes somebody's imaginary estimate and multiplies it by pi and you exp it, your result will necessarily be complex, yet the error will be easy to bound with a circular range (even if with an initial wild guess)... Just say'n...
No need to upgrade to new software, it should run on Win7. There are multiple ways to configure compatibility.
FWIW, Win7 seems to be much more friedly to this than win8.
I've had two 16-bit programs (one used for point-of-sale another a game my mom likes to play) hobbling along since win95. WinXP worked okay (some compatibility flags made it work), Win7 was a bear to make work with the printer and the point-of-sale program, and finally win8 broke both of them. No application error message, just win8 says, you can't run them anymore (the troubleshooter recommends using winxp mode sp3, but that doesn't work, nor do any of the other modes from win95, 98, me, XP-sp2, Vista, or win7, w/ or w/o administrator priviledges, or in reduced color mode). The orginal publisher of both pieces of software are no longer in business, so purchasing upgrades to the new OS is a non-starter.
I've had to downgrade two new computers back to win7 and winxp (didn't have more than one spare win7 licence, so I had to reach back to xp) to support these programs for now, but now the writing is on the wall. I'm sure that my case is not unique and given my predicament, I'm sure that there are some applications that just won't run on win7 either even in compatibility mode.
Geeze, "the paper quoted Alibaba public relations official Zhang Jianhua", so why is Yahoo! US being cited?
I don't think Yahoo! US is being cited. Alibaba group acquired Yahoo China back in 2005 and operationally, Yahoo China is being cited (which is owned and run by Alibaba)... It's kind of like how you'd have a Google spokesperson being cited when talking about Android (which used to be a separate company and was coincidentally bought by Google also in 2005)...
As for why this is happening... I'm guessing that back in 2005, the Alibaba group got a lot of mileage from using the Yahoo name, but now that value is probably declining. As Alibaba and Yahoo start unwinding their relationship (Yahoo recently promised to divest itself of its Alibaba holdings*** which would simplify Alibaba executing an IPO) and they are starting to develop their own internet holdings to compete with Baidu (the leader in China) they have even less incentive to continue to use the Yahoo name.
***I think I remember for a time it was estimated that the value of ownership that Yahoo held in Alibaba (which is currently a privately held company) as a result of the transfer of Yahoo China was worth more than the entire market cap of Yahoo (meaning either the value of Yahoo's investment was underestimated by the US stock market players, or maybe that the rest of Yahoo had negative value, depending on your point of view)
If you go to a restaurant, order a meal, and offer the appropriate amount of cash to pay for your meal, the restaurant owner cannot legally refuse to accept your cash and then have you arrested for not paying your debt to them.
As other posters pointed out, this is just not true. The dollar bill is only legal tender for private debts. Say, if a restaurant owner's menu was denominated in BTC and you only offered to pay in USD, they technically can take you to court for not paying for your meal in BTC, however, the judgement (if in their favor) will be necesarily denominated in dollars which you can pay off with bills that are legal tender and will relieve you of that debt. On the other hand, the restaurant owner might try convince the police to arrest you and charge you with petty theft instead which instead of a tort, would be an actual crime (albeit a misdemenor). There may be fines and restitution involved in this case and those would also be necessarily denominated in dollars. Most likely, however, would be that the restaurant owner would take whatever you had to avoid the trouble (fwiw, this happens all the time as cash only restaurants will relucantly accept CCs or checks or even foreign currency to avoid a dine/dash scenario).
None of this stops you from exchanging your RAM sticks for someone else's kumquats if you and the kumquat-seller both agree to it.
Technically, in the USA bartering is generally taxable to the extent of the fair market value in USD of the products or services bartered. This includes local "use-tax" (the replacement for sales tax with the exchange of personal goods), and if larger amounts income tax under Internal Revenue Code Section 61. This tax would be collected in dollars.
So you still need dollars to legally conduct an exchange transaction.
Because if you write a press release to try and talk up investors, you only talk about the SAM (serviceable available market), not the TAM (total available market) for your products. Here's the original source...
Age-related macular degeneration (AMD), diabetic retinopathy (DR) and other retinal diseases afflict more than 40 million people in countries with advanced health care systems. Roughly 13 million people suffer from these diseases in the United States.
For example, the EU has roughtly 8 million people that suffer from wet-AMD and DR. If you have any of these diseases and you are in a country w/o advanced health care systems, you are simply classified as blind (which is the eventual outcome for these diseases). This software (even if it were available and worked), will not help folks that are unfortunate enough to live in a country where appropriate treatments are unavailable.
Sadly, with wet-AMD, there is no actual effective treatment today. There are some drugs known to slow the advance, of this disease, but not reverse it. With DR, there is some hope when reversing the diabetic aspect, but that is not really a great situation either.
The result is really that it became easier to get a technical diploma. People enter the job market with less experience. Companies need to invest more to train their technical people.
Non sequitor. Either the government is responsible for training the citizen workforce (and are free to tax corporations to do so), or they give some of that money back to companies to invest more to train their own technical people (many large companies already budget for this).
The problem is that students often aren't very discriminating when purchasing education resources (especially if subsidized by the government). That is why universities are able to get away with lowering standards to attract more people. If students were more discriminating, they would see through this and direct their purchase of educational resources towards more potentially valuable educations. Of course if the goverenment has a monopoly on education, they can probably just get away with this w/o any consequences, but in the USA at least, there are quite a few private options that will generally keep the public universities honest (in the engineering and hard sciences anyhow).
Slashdot Mirror
France tried decimal time after the French revolution (each day had 10 hours, 100 minutes/hour, 100 seconds/minute)...
They also tried a wacky calendar: 12-month year, 30 days/month each consisting of 10-day "weeks".
Perhaps the whole thing failed because their scheme only suggested 1/10 days of rest instead of 1/7 (because 2/10 was too much historically). Given the current French employment situation, perhaps 3/10 days off is better than 2/7?
In a bad scenaro...
If energy became essentially "free", it might be possible for a small number of well financed crazy people to hoarde/concentrate enough energy to cause an event that created enough damage to make the earth uninhabitable. That would be a bad scenaro.
Your "bad" scenaro is merely disappointing...
If they're dealing with AMD, I think they mean 45nm.
As I recall, AMD started their march away from global foundaries and started using TSMC for their original Fusion chips at the 40nm bulk CMOS node and Microsoft has historically fabed at TSMC, so there's no reason to doubt that the XboxOne SOC is a 40nm chip fabbed at TSMC.
Although the 28nm node is currently the most advanced process TSMC has in production, it is currently severely wafer start constrained (Qualcomm, AMD, Nvidia, are all big customers chewing up all spare capacity), so TSMC's "N-1" 40nm node is probably easier to ramp a product in if you need large production capacity by christmas and you don't care too much about die size... AFAIK, TSMC's 40nm node is just the "shrink" of their 45nm node, so their isn't any compelling reason to use 45nm for a new design unless you wanted to just have bigger chips with fewer chips on each wafer and more defects***
***you would typically only run a 45nm process if you had millions of dollars of chip reticles sitting around and you wanted to make a few more chips w/o making new reticles for 40nm..
Is it normal for the carrier to not outright buy the phone until they sell it?
I don't know about phones, but in the distribution world, it is very common for a reseller to not actually buy a product before it is sold.
Many companies these days work on a virtual inventory basis with their primary supply chain. The basic idea is that the seller of the product effectively leases space in the warehouse to the supplier with a contract such that the supplier agrees to maintain a certain amount of virtual inventory. When the seller sells-through a product, they don't actually have to pay for the inventory until the second the unit is "pulled" from this hub and then the supplier bills the seller and is on the hook to replenish this inventory. Of course the seller discontinues that product, then it just never pulls any more units from hub and the supplier is left holding the bag (even though the inventory is in the seller's warehouse). On the sale, the seller often still has "net-90" days to pay for it as well. As you can see, the life of the supplier isn't easy, nowdays they need to pay for both the inventory and the account receivables side...
For the inventory on the shelf there is a similar paradigm, as part of the shelf stocking agreement, a repurchase agreement is made that the seller can require the supplier to purchase back some or all of the inventory (although usually at a discounted rate), if the inventory hasn't been sold in a certain number of days. This type of stock/repurchase agreements happens in industries far and wide, supermarkets to bookseller to electronic's retailers.
The rationale for the seller offering a high repurchase price and percentages is for the seller and supplier to maximise the amount of product on the shelves (to prevent out-of-stock sales loss) given the seller's risk tolerance for the product. Of course the supplier may be irrational, but the seller is covered a bit in this case... Usually the seller says I'll risk $X to stock your product on the shelf and the agreement is structured by the supplier that although $Y of inventory is stocked, $Y - #units X repurchase_price = $X.
That's why so many "liberal" examinations of the issues have resulted to separating out "in-classroom" spending, but they are dismissed as inconvenient, and the numbers used by the school-haters are always total funding.
I see why you put the word "liberal" in quotes...
I'm curious how "rubber-room" spending is categorized? (fwiw, new york city statistically has one of the highest in-classroom spending ratios in the country)
An interesting read, if you have the time...
http://www.thegatesnotes.com/Books/Education/Where-Do-School-Funds-Go-Book-Review
Apparently, State Senator Yee doesn't readily give up if laws that he supports eventually are declared unconstitutional...
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2009/07/sensationalist-legal-brief-aims-to-revive-ca-game-law/
FWIW, he's the same state senator that sponsored the bill to ban the sale of violent video games to minors, and has seemed to make harrassment of the video game biz his personal mission...
He's also sponsored legislation to ban any semi-automatics that have conversion kits... I suppose this is the next logical step for him since basically a 3d printer is the ultimate conversion kit.
Concurrent code isn't new.
Are universities teaching communicating sequential processes to undergraduates yet?
As an inmos refuge that was initially brainwashed by CSP, it's pretty clear that CSP isn't the only way to skin the concurrent code beast and not every thing that is taught as CSP is actually formal enough to be benefit from any of the CSP verification techniques (e.g., shared data structures are quite common in practical systems), so it has really devolved into more of a "meme" than a programming technique that is taught.
As a trivial example, simple server/client is at its surface a CSP-like programming paradigm, until you realize that underneath the database server, there's probably some ACID implementation stuff that can't really be taught the same way (since they usually rely on some sort of global locks which are difficult and not realistic components in a pure CSP analysis framework).
I liken CSP to OOP. Many claim to lament that the younglings aren't taught the proper way to apply OOP, but those people don't often look in the mirror, as they have devolved OOP into a meme consisting of a few coding guidelines rather than a way to be taught to think about code and potential latent bugs. Not to say that everyone should live and breathe CSP/OOP, but perhaps the most valuable part is just the memes and the coding guidelines (which can be learned quite quickly).
Insurance Company's would pay for this. The longer you live, the more money you can pay them.
Actually, I doubt it. The longer you live, the more likely you would be to experience an expensive condition which they would have to pay for. Insurance companies would ideally want you to pay whilst you are healthy and then die immediatly after contracting any expensive condition (before they have to pay too much). Chronic conditions where you continue to toil on and pay premiums lower than the cost to the company are probably the worst for insurance companies (although conversely it is the "best" case for the the drug companies).
For those that want a car analogy, this is kinda like how some people want to sell their cars before there are any (inevitable) serious repair costs associated with owning a car that is wearing out. Also, if there a serious incident, at some point, an insurance company would rather "total-out" the car than to actually pay for repair costs. In fact this idea used to be a common feature of health insurance policies (although I think that life-time maximums are no longer legal terms in health insurance policies in the US).
Although this study speculates that GDF-11 is the primary active agent, that information is unknown...
However, as we have discovered, blood is much more complicated that we think it is. Also, actual testing of blood substitutes on humans has been very controversial (since many have been unsuspecting/uninformed participants). For example, I doubt very many people remember PolyHeme... Here's and interesting snipet from the wiki...
The testing was completed at more than 25 Level I trauma centers in the United States under a Food and Drug Administration special category (21CFR 50.24) in 1996 that allows its use without patient consent in special circumstances. PolyHeme was the 15th such experiment allowed by the FDA. Although Northfield Laboratories came under scrutiny for this trial, enrollment of the 720 patient trial was completed on July 31, 2006. "Between 2003 and 2006, 720 trauma victims at thirty-two U.S. medical centers were "enrolled" in a research study to determine the efficacy of Polyheme, a patented blood substitute manufactured by Northfield Laboratories". [1]
The controversy arose from the fact that the participants in this study were incapable of giving their consent due to the nature of their injuries. The only way to opt out from the study was by wearing a special bracelet prior to needing emergency care (the bracelet can be requested by calling 717-531-5829). This practice is sanctioned by the FDA as necessary emergency research, but patients’ rights groups protested the study.
...another key attribute of applications executed in the browser is security. The browser has a consistant security footprint that I trust a lot more than I trust new applications.
I imagine that if we did statistics today on this, not only does much more malware exist in stuffs executed by the browser than from applications that they install, they are also much more likely to get malware from the browser vector than any other vector (because of compromised sites and random surfing).
Sure much of the malware payload isn't pure javascript, but many vulnerablities start there (e.g., xss, csrf, etc) and in the implementations of the "sandboxes" that browsers use to run the malware^H applets/plugins (like java).
I think you trust is misplaced in the current environment.
News at 11...
What this appears to be talking about is how at the airport they now swab your carry-on luggage and put it in a machine. I don't think these boston folks would have been though any "swabing" checkpoint so the existance of a device that did this probably would not have made anyone "safer" in this case (or any similar non-airport/govt-building checkpoint situation).
For those curious, the idea behind an IMS (ion mobility spectrometer), is that you ionize your sample (well sort of, you have water or other liquid vapor with ions dissolved in it, not just pure ions in air or in a vaccum) and waft them into a drift tube and use fact that these ionized vapors have slightly different masses so they have different mobility under an electric field. The "spectra" of the mobility under this electric field helps to identify the original chemicals in the swab.
The specific problem they are trying to solve with black powder is that the ions formed by Sulphur (atomic mass 32) and Oxygen (atomic mass 16) are very difficult to disambiguate for a clean detection signal (since O2n- and S1n- have about the same mass).
The common method of disamgibuating is to add solvents or chemical reagents before ionization. AFAIK, in the case of Oxygen interference, a common way to change the ionic signature is to add dichlorolmethane CH2CL2 and the resulting reaction usually exchanges O2- ions for CL- ions (which is enough different than sulphur ion to make it easy to detect), but unfortuantly, dichloromethane also has a side effect of inhibiting the formation of various Sulphur ion allotropes (i.e., different number of sulphur atoms in the ion). So these folks apparently came up with a technique where you ionize first (avoiding the problem with CH2CL2 and sulphur ion formation) and then pass all the ions through a CH2CL2 "titration region" in the drift tube (effectively replacing many of O2- ions that mask the sulphur ion signature with Cl- ions).
Of course the devil is in the details which I haven't read about yet...
You live in a computer simulation.
And so does this supercomputer...
That raises up the question of how can a supercomputer simulate what our species would do if it had access to a supercomputer that could simulate what our species would do if it had access to a supercomputer that could simulate...
Out of memory [core dump]
% rm -rf *
Which of course begs the question...
PBKAC
In case you didn't know, these "neo-nicotinoid" insectides are basically engineered substitutes for nicotine that affect insects more than people (as opposed to the normal nicotine that affects people more than insects). As I understand it, if an insect eats get too much of this chemical, their nervous systems basically stop working (it overloads certiain receptors so they stop propogating signals), and the insects become paralyzed and eventually they die. Apparently it doesn't get past the blood-brain barrier on most vertibrates, so it isn't too toxic to us (or so they say)...
Typically bees don't eat plants, so in theory they are affected less by this, but it seems plausible to me that bees would be affect by this as well as I imagine insectides cannot be applied perfectly, and sustained exposure can't be a good thing.
I have no idea how low-level exposure would affect a bee, but given how nicotine exposure affects humans, maybe there's something there...
Sadly, this isn't any different than a scam that some government contractors play.
In many government contracts, there are set-asides for women and/or minority owned businesses. Sometimes less than scrupulous goverment contractors set up shell companies that name a women and/or a minority as a principal owner (more often than not a wife of the owners of the original contractors) and bid on those contracts with set-asides to avoid competition and make more profit. Inevitably, some of the work come the way of the shell company, and these shell companies simply subcontract the actual work to the original shady governnment contractors at a non-competitive price and kick-back a finders fee of sorts to the principals of the shell company.
Government (and eventually the taxpayers) lose every day to these types of scams and you don't hear about them. The wake of the Sarah Hanson / Manti teo / Dora Ratjen style of scams is generally much smaller (although potentially more media tickling)
Although some folks call this energy source a metal-air "battery", since it has an anode and cathode and an electrolyte, in many situations, more like a metal-air fuel cell than a "battery" as its anode is consumed in a reaction that is not efficiently reversable from an energy point of view (if at all in some varients) and thus not rechargeable in the traditional sense of an automobile battery.
Of course, this doesn't make it unusable. In fact, quick mechanical replacemement of the fuel that stores the energy is the one big advantage of gasoline powered engines, that might be enabled by a metal-air fuel cell (you might be able to empty the old reactant and replace with new metal-air fuel pellets in filling station). But to say this is a battery technology does not really convey what is exciting about this technology.
He takes everyones estimate by 'pi'....In my exp he is right.
If your PM takes somebody's imaginary estimate and multiplies it by pi and you exp it, your result will necessarily be complex, yet the error will be easy to bound with a circular range (even if with an initial wild guess)... Just say'n...
dosbox doesnt work?
Both are 16-bit windows programs, not dos programs...
No need to upgrade to new software, it should run on Win7. There are multiple ways to configure compatibility.
FWIW, Win7 seems to be much more friedly to this than win8.
I've had two 16-bit programs (one used for point-of-sale another a game my mom likes to play) hobbling along since win95. WinXP worked okay (some compatibility flags made it work), Win7 was a bear to make work with the printer and the point-of-sale program, and finally win8 broke both of them. No application error message, just win8 says, you can't run them anymore (the troubleshooter recommends using winxp mode sp3, but that doesn't work, nor do any of the other modes from win95, 98, me, XP-sp2, Vista, or win7, w/ or w/o administrator priviledges, or in reduced color mode). The orginal publisher of both pieces of software are no longer in business, so purchasing upgrades to the new OS is a non-starter.
I've had to downgrade two new computers back to win7 and winxp (didn't have more than one spare win7 licence, so I had to reach back to xp) to support these programs for now, but now the writing is on the wall. I'm sure that my case is not unique and given my predicament, I'm sure that there are some applications that just won't run on win7 either even in compatibility mode.
Geeze, "the paper quoted Alibaba public relations official Zhang Jianhua", so why is Yahoo! US being cited?
I don't think Yahoo! US is being cited. Alibaba group acquired Yahoo China back in 2005 and operationally, Yahoo China is being cited (which is owned and run by Alibaba)... It's kind of like how you'd have a Google spokesperson being cited when talking about Android (which used to be a separate company and was coincidentally bought by Google also in 2005)...
As for why this is happening... I'm guessing that back in 2005, the Alibaba group got a lot of mileage from using the Yahoo name, but now that value is probably declining. As Alibaba and Yahoo start unwinding their relationship (Yahoo recently promised to divest itself of its Alibaba holdings*** which would simplify Alibaba executing an IPO) and they are starting to develop their own internet holdings to compete with Baidu (the leader in China) they have even less incentive to continue to use the Yahoo name.
***I think I remember for a time it was estimated that the value of ownership that Yahoo held in Alibaba (which is currently a privately held company) as a result of the transfer of Yahoo China was worth more than the entire market cap of Yahoo (meaning either the value of Yahoo's investment was underestimated by the US stock market players, or maybe that the rest of Yahoo had negative value, depending on your point of view)
If you go to a restaurant, order a meal, and offer the appropriate amount of cash to pay for your meal, the restaurant owner cannot legally refuse to accept your cash and then have you arrested for not paying your debt to them.
As other posters pointed out, this is just not true. The dollar bill is only legal tender for private debts. Say, if a restaurant owner's menu was denominated in BTC and you only offered to pay in USD, they technically can take you to court for not paying for your meal in BTC, however, the judgement (if in their favor) will be necesarily denominated in dollars which you can pay off with bills that are legal tender and will relieve you of that debt. On the other hand, the restaurant owner might try convince the police to arrest you and charge you with petty theft instead which instead of a tort, would be an actual crime (albeit a misdemenor). There may be fines and restitution involved in this case and those would also be necessarily denominated in dollars. Most likely, however, would be that the restaurant owner would take whatever you had to avoid the trouble (fwiw, this happens all the time as cash only restaurants will relucantly accept CCs or checks or even foreign currency to avoid a dine/dash scenario).
None of this stops you from exchanging your RAM sticks for someone else's kumquats if you and the kumquat-seller both agree to it.
Technically, in the USA bartering is generally taxable to the extent of the fair market value in USD of the products or services bartered. This includes local "use-tax" (the replacement for sales tax with the exchange of personal goods), and if larger amounts income tax under Internal Revenue Code Section 61. This tax would be collected in dollars.
So you still need dollars to legally conduct an exchange transaction.
Because if you write a press release to try and talk up investors, you only talk about the SAM (serviceable available market), not the TAM (total available market) for your products. Here's the original source...
Age-related macular degeneration (AMD), diabetic retinopathy (DR) and other retinal diseases afflict more than 40 million people in countries with advanced health care systems. Roughly 13 million people suffer from these diseases in the United States.
For example, the EU has roughtly 8 million people that suffer from wet-AMD and DR. If you have any of these diseases and you are in a country w/o advanced health care systems, you are simply classified as blind (which is the eventual outcome for these diseases). This software (even if it were available and worked), will not help folks that are unfortunate enough to live in a country where appropriate treatments are unavailable.
Sadly, with wet-AMD, there is no actual effective treatment today. There are some drugs known to slow the advance, of this disease, but not reverse it. With DR, there is some hope when reversing the diabetic aspect, but that is not really a great situation either.
The result is really that it became easier to get a technical diploma. People enter the job market with less experience. Companies need to invest more to train their technical people.
Non sequitor. Either the government is responsible for training the citizen workforce (and are free to tax corporations to do so), or they give some of that money back to companies to invest more to train their own technical people (many large companies already budget for this).
The problem is that students often aren't very discriminating when purchasing education resources (especially if subsidized by the government). That is why universities are able to get away with lowering standards to attract more people. If students were more discriminating, they would see through this and direct their purchase of educational resources towards more potentially valuable educations. Of course if the goverenment has a monopoly on education, they can probably just get away with this w/o any consequences, but in the USA at least, there are quite a few private options that will generally keep the public universities honest (in the engineering and hard sciences anyhow).