For those not familar with what is going on in the video compression standards group, there were 2 independent efforts: HEVC (the so-called high-efficiency video codec to update H.264) and the IVC (internet video codec). IVC was not meant to replace HEVC, but be optimized for internet applications. Many folks seem to be confusing these in their responses.
One of the goals for IVC was for it to acheive so-called "type-1" licensing (basically free-as-in-beer) which would require all those that contribute to the standard to freely licence their patents. Of course the ISO/IEC groups that standardize this stuff (aka the MPEG group) cannot assure that the standard is free of patents, but only that no contributor to the standard will charge for the use of their patents in conjunction with the use of the standard.
The original baseline for IVC was a stripped down version of MPEG2 (basically MPEG1++ or MPEG2-- depending on your point of view) that was thought to be unencumbered by patents (MPEG1 is really old and some of the patents that cover it are even older and expired). Google submitted their VP8 for consideration for IVC. Needless to say, the ITM (IVC Test Model used to experiment with IVC) didn't perform very well relative to the more modern VP8 in recent comparison tests in Bit-Distortion modeling.
I would venture to guess that Google decided that it needed to clear the air with MPEG-LA (not related to ISO/IEC, but a separate patent-pool/licensing company created by the owners of the patents of original MPEG standard and some other corporations) so that it did not hinder its proposal for being considered as the baseline IVC codec for the test model.
Lest folks think that current VP8 is going to get through unscathed by the MPEG group, I believe that they will warp it a bit so that it isn't exactly the same as the current VP8 (as that's what the ISO/IEC group's charter is to develop new standards). That's one of the reasons why Microsoft didn't try to standardize WM9/10 codecs with the ISO/IEC standards body and they instead went to SMPTE (which has a history of just stamping "standard" on proprietary implementations). Unsuprisingly, SMPTE dutifuly stamped Microsoft's codec as SMPTE 421M (aka VC-1) w/o any substantial changes.
Myth 1: Xscale was somehow the best ARM at the time.
Xscale was basically inherited by Intel from DEC StrongArm (which arguably might have been the best at their time back in 1996), but by the time Intel bought it and rebadged it Xscale, it was pretty middling Arm implementation.
Myth 2: Intel sold it to Freescale (they actually sold it to Marvel).
There is a common misconception that somehow CCD imagers are superior to CMOS imagers in general. In reality, the only main advantage of CCD imagers is that the process technology available to them have the ability to be more sensitive in the near IR range (by increasing the epi-layer thickness). In addition CCD imagers have some special techiques available to them for low-noise gain (electron multiplication and temporal delay integration) that don't have similar low-noise counterparts in CMOS imager (since CMOS conversion circuits are more voltage oriented than electron/current oriented and doing circuit operation on voltages is more noisy than on currents/electrons).
However, if your application doesn't avail themselves of using these techniques most of which are only interesting in extremely-low-light applications (like astronomy), many digital CCD sensor images will end up inferior to their CMOS counterparts. On an CCD, the analog/digital conversion circuitry generally need to have higher bandwidth (because they can't be integrated as easily with the sensor array, you are wire limited and must timeshare the wires for readout and thus need to read-out faster) and higher bandwidth A/Ds have more noise negating much of the CCD advantages. In a CMOS sensor counterparts, the a/d conversion circuitry is more parallel and can be designed for lower-bandwidth and thus lower overall noise (because you aren't amplifying the high-frequency noise).
There is also the general result that CMOS sensor development rides on the coattails of high-volume production characterization of parametric values (because of cell-phones), whereas CCDs being much higher power current-operation devices are not as economically attractive to high-volume markets and thus tend to have low-production runs and suffer more variance in parameteric values.
Replace dog, with a cellphone and you could make a similar case...
Mostly, it was the cellphones that approched humans. Early cellphones that were clunky and not user friendly would likely be discarded by humans, those that were bold and user friendly were likely to be tolerated. In a few generations, those cellphones that were user friendly became distinctive from their clunky counterparts with touch glass, accelerometers, and retina screens. As cell phone owners, we take for granted that our cellphones can understand our gestures and requests, but that's something that even our closest relatives — chimpanzees and bonobos — can't read our gestures as readily as cellphones can. With this new ability, these cellphones were worth owning. People who had cellphones during a trip would likely have had an advantage over those who didn't. Finally when times were tough, cellphones could have served as an emergency money supply (you can fence them) and once humans realized the usefulness of keeping cellphones as emergency money, it was not a huge jump to realize tablets could be used in a similar way. This is the secret to the genius of cellphones: It's when cellphones join forces with us that they become special. Cellphones may even have been the catalyst for our modern civilization.
Therefore: Cellphones sought out humans and domesticated us? Stupid.... or is it stupid?;^)
HDCP (the drm stuff) is essentially licenced from Intel. Intel only basically agreed to allow HDCP to be used on DVI and HDMI (originally) and only reluctantly allowed it for DisplayPort only after Intel's competing technolgy went bust (and vesa basically threatened to use another drm scheme which intel would then have to license).
Since it's unlikely that intel would have licenced HDCP to Apple for this purpose, it's likely that Apple was forced to use their own drm scheme between the lightning port to the hdmi dongle to comply with the licencing requirement for external monitor connections and the only way they could deploy it was to have a chip made to implement it or put it in software on an ARM chip.
Anybody knows why they'll carry so much cargo back? [yes, please google that for me]
I'm sure you are familiar with the concept of conservation of mass. What do you think they do with the mass they launch up there? convert it to energy using a Mr. Fusion? Or do you think they would just jettison 2000lbs into some random orbit? One of the biggest logistical challenges the ISS has, is that w/o the Space Shuttle, there has been limited "downmass" capability.
Although most of the downmass is the results of experiements and broken/obsolete equipment, all the garbage and of course the "digested" food they take up there need to come back down to the ground too. Just like camping in many remote national parks, if you pack it in, you must pack it out (poop included).
Instead of asking how to educate people, I think we need to come to grips with what people want when they say they want education.
At a personal level, although there is a vague notion that somehow education is important, it's likely that the thing most important to individual people about an education is not the fact or skills that are obtained, but certification that is conveyed and the value of that certification in societal status. If this is indeed true, the root desire for most folks in obtaining an education is differentiation (presumably from the "uneducated" masses). Could this differentiation be achieved by simply learning a set of facts and/or skills? Or does much of the value come in the form of the certification?
At a societal level, there are some economic benefits to having masses know enough facts and learn enough skills to create value in the economy and to allow the citizenry at large to reap the benefits of a relatively better economy (even those that don't know the facts or nor learned the skills).
So to this end, governments often invest in elements of a certified education to assist in the efficiency of the economy (e.g., allow more optimal allocation of workers to enterprises, and a more learned workforce in general). But to whom specifically does it confer most of the value of this investment? Bestowing rewards to the "smart", and "motivated" are perhaps easy calls for the highest levels of certification, but what about the masses? Or the motivated parents (wealthy or not) that wish to buy status for their children? Things get a bit dicey and politically incorrect from there since it is not possible to grant differentiation to everyone (by definition of differentiation).
For the masses, the conventional wisdom is to create a process we call education where the people can be taught the facts and skills and be certified for their accomplishment. This has the unspoken assumption that most anyone can be taught and that the certification has value.
Hopefully we can all see the flaw in this. If everyone can be taught, there is little to no differentiation and the certification has little value (other than the recipient has already been taught). You can see this today in the mainstream job market: HS diplomas are almost meaningless. Does that mean everyone can be taught, or does it mean the certification of the facts and skills indicated by a HS diploma are non-differentiating. Does improving teaching improve this situation in either case? Probably not.
The real value in improving teaching is not to help us individual students learn, but at a societal level to improve the economy. How do you measure this? Probably this is only measured in aggregate which is an evaluation mechanism that students, teachers, and people who study the education processes tend to discount as they concentrate on the achievement of the individual.
So do we do away with the notion of a certified education? My feeling is that will reduce the efficiency in the economy. All enterprises would need to develop their own training and evaluation criteria and job seekers will probably be less likely to present meaningful credentials to prospective new employers.
If we stick with the concept of a certified education, what are we certifying? If you believe in "tests" as a sole means of evaluation, that might be easy to answer, but if you believe (as I do) that learning is more than the sum of facts and skills, it's hard to say that you can successfully replace teachers with ipads and present a meaningful certification result.
For example, when I interview a college graduate that didn't drop out, I know that at least they could put up with a hierarchical institutional environment for 4 years and were able to do sufficient amount of learning to make academic progress. Since I desire them to stay in my company and contribute for more than a few years if I hire them and spend the resources to train them, that's an important nugget of information right there independent o
unless they borrowed it from the treasury, tax payers dont pay for it. plus there's that whole thing about having to pay back whatever you borrow.
Since this manuver reduces the effective tax rate of the gross earnings***, the net result is that the US treasury gets less tax revenue for the same amount of gross earnings. Since the US government doesn't seem to be able to reduce spending, it must borrow more money than if it had gotten the tax revenues which costs the US tax payers.
Net result: US tax payers pay for the tax reduction received by the Costco shareholders.
*** basically, by borrowing the money (at a currently very low interest rate), Costco converts the taxable date of future revenue to TY2012. Although the shareholder pays this tax now, this was done to take advantage of a lower rate due to "bush" taxcuts. If that revenue was recognized in TY2013 or later it would would be part of the valuation of the company/stock and/or part of a future dividend would be subject to a higher future tax rate....
FYI, The founder of Costco (Jim Sinegal) retired as CEO in January 2012. Although he remains on the board of directors, the reigns have been passed to another insider Craig Jelinek...
Lest you think Costco is all about bucking Wall Street, you should know that they borrowed (yes borrowed) $3.5Billion (with a 'B') to pay out a special dividend to shareholders ahead of the tax increase that is scheduled to take place this year. This typical short term Wall Street manuever no doubt just transfered almost a billion or so from the US treasury to Costco shareholders (and probably didn't do much to help the employees or customers who as taxpayers will be forced to help fund this manuever).
When a person resigns, they are not eligible for unemployment insurance.
That's not really true. A friend of mine runs a small business in silicon valley (Fremont), and one of her workers quit and moved with her husband 60 miles away to Stockton. When she applied for unemployment, California classified this as "voluntary quit with good cause" and granted her full benefits even though her husband was commuting from Stockton to Milpitas (about 5 miles from Fremont) every day. After 3 protests with the mediation board and eventually a full hearing with the board, the inital ruling didn't change.
My friend was not necessarily trying to invalidate her benefits, just trying to avoid the ex-worker's UI benefits charged to her UI account which caused her UI premiums to rise, but of course CA being broke they certainly wanted to bill her UI benefits to some company and not the general funds, so I guess all this protest was futile.
Short story, unemployment benefits can be granted for just about any reason you can convice a bunch of government bureaucrats is a good reason. Don't believe that whole "when you quit, you don't get unemployment benefits" nonsense. I'm guessing that changing the terms of employment causing travelling or relocation hardship will definitely be judged as "voluntary quit with good cause" and eligible for full benefits.
The only question is what happens with cross-state employment (e.g., say an employee in Nebraska). I'm not so sure they are eligible for CA unemployment, so they would have to apply for unemployment in their own state (or country), which may not be so lenient (or generous) with UI benefits.
Although you are "tenured" (removed from probationary status) after two years, that doesn't mean you can't be furloughed. All tenure does is secure your spot on the bottom of the senority list for your school. If you are near the bottom of that list and the school district needs to layoff some-number of teachers, you probably still lose your job. Moving to a new school district will start the clock again.
With the current budgetary environment in California, this isn't a merely theoretical, it is what is happening to nearly all recently hired teachers. Even surviving to tenure, nearly all people on the bottom of the senority list get layoff notices every year until the districts figure out their budget, and hire most (but not all) of them back. Young, enthusiastic, qualified teachers (including several who were friends of mine) are leaving the state for more stable job opportunities elsewhere.
Basically, tenure doesn't mean much in the CA system. Non-tenured means simply the probationary period (kind of like a teacher internship) is still going on. Basically it's all about senority with teachers.
Of course nobody like a layoff, but real organizations (including non-profit organizations) would use an unfortuante layoff opportunity to clean house, where as schools are forced to simply sacrifice the future for today.
Even silicon area isn't that impressive - a good dSLR will have a camera sensor with a large silicon area. Hell, there are FPGAs with just as big silicon dies as well.
Not all technologies are comparable...
Canon's APS-H sensor is 550mm^2, it has ~120Mpixels which about 4 transistors/pixels isn't very dense (mostly photodiode area).
State of the art DRAM is 4Gbit which at about 2 transistors/bit is only 8G transistors. Samsung's leading edge NAND flash chip is the TLC (triple level cell or 3bits/transistor) 17.2B transistor chip (about 48Gibits and generally high-density flash drives are built out of several lower-density chips and a flash drive controller chip).
Intel's Ivy bridge processor has 1.4B transistors on a 160mm^2 die and their 10-core Xeon has 2.6B transistors. Xylinx Virtex-7 2000T FPGA has 6.8B transistors (but it uses stacked silicon interconnect 2.5D technology)
It may not be at the limit of wafer technology, but it's right up there with the Xylinx Virtex-7 2000T...
However, you may not be aware, that random defect density often isn't the only limiter to die size. There are also limits to the reticle size and the stepper. Often you have run-out limited, alignment-limited or stepper-limited sizes to stamping out die on a wafer. For TSMC, that limit is generally about 600mm^2 (intel apparently can do 700mm^2), so 551mm^2 is pretty close to maxing this out. Thus if you could patten a wafer scale device you would eventually reach the random defect density limited yield limit, however, long before this, the current stepper photo-lithographic alignment technology will have been greatly exceeded.
I don't know about PeerJ specifically, but typically the editor (or more generally, editorial board desginees) for the journal selects the specific reviewer(s) for a paper. They don't just hold up a paper and ask for volunteers for a specific paper. To execute the strategy of signing up a bunch of shills and hoping that the editor will randomly select them, and nobody who would actually do a legitimate peer-review, is probably not going to be a very good long term strategy if the editors aren't in cahoots, although it might occasionally work for a very obscure topic.
On the other hand, that's no worse than the situation today (the more obsure the research, the more cooperative backscratching there is).
The bigger problem I see is how to entice quality peer-review volunteers. Traditional Journals entice peer-reviewers by offering stuff like book vouchers, or free access for a few weeks per reviewed article and/or free access to all references in the paper during the peer review duration. If it costs nothing to access the journal, these traditional enticements don't have any value. As I understand it, to make up for this, they are forcing members to "volunteer" to review at least 1 time per year (or at least comment on a public submission). I don't see how this would be very effective out of the gate, but as with the/. moderation system, I'm sure it will be tweaked over time...
FWIW, it seems that PeerJ is apparently currently only Biology and Medical Science Journal (not a true megajournal). Journals in those fields tend to have the most egregious pricing scales and have the most annoying editorial boards (because there are limited publishing options). I'm sure that's a deliberate marketing ploy (hit the Journal industry where it's the most vunerable).
FWIW, in some modern ICs (that I've worked on) the most critical parts of a rom (e.g., a boot loader that validates a pre-boot image), are generally not implemented as a masked rom, but basically compiled gates. The logic compiler (more often than not the program called Design Compiler from Synopsys) is given the contents of the rom described as a big case statement: given an address, assign data output. The compiler produces a semi-optimal set of logic gates to implement the 'ROM' function.
During the layout process, a big batch of spare gates is heaped into the mess in case a metal-mask patch is required. To create the patch, a complex tool is used to recompile the gates, using the constraints that only existing gates are used to create the patch. Although it sounds like a magical tool, most large semiconductor companies have such tools (often called ECO or engineering-change-order tools) to allow them to make small logical changes in a chip to fix small bugs in a few metal masks to avoid going through a whole chip refabrication that changes which gates are used (basically the same idea as a masked rom). For those software folks among us, think about the ECO tool as the hardware analogy of a tool that automates return-oriented programming (ROP).
Since the result is just a pile of gates and not a regular grid, it has the effect of retrieving the contents really difficult to automate from a visual inspection point of view (almost as difficult as the Logic-vs-schematic design verification process except now you have to create the schematic from pictures from different layers on the chip).
On the other hand, that is usually not the weakest link in the system. As mentioned, if the embedded processor can read the rom, it can be often tricked into doing so by being run in a debug mode, so this is only one piece of the security puzzle.
How is Dell already reporting is 2013 third quarter? Exactly what calendar dates are covered by that quarter?
In the US, large corporation are allowed to define their own fiscal "year" for financial reporting as long as it is constitent with the rules (basically it must be 52-53 weeks long and close at the end of a month or a day of the week). Dell uses a fiscal year that ends on the friday nearest to january 31st. Often corporations choose fiscal years to match with other similar companies, or to smooth out revenue reporting (e.g., say Q3 captures all of the christmas revenue, minus the returns). The number is set by the year of the 4th quarter.
For example, the US government uses the following fiscal year for FY2013
1st quarter: 1 October 2012 – 31 December 2012 2nd quarter: 1 January 2013 – 31 March 2013 3rd quarter: 1 April 2013 – 30 June 2013 4th quarter: 1 July 2013 – 30 September 2013
Small nit. As I understand it, one of the main reasons the US is not returning people declared innocent back to their homes, is that those countries don't seem to want them back, and we don't want them here, and we haven't found a country willing to take them... Therefore... That's where we stand today.
For example, apparently 40 were cleared for release by Bush Administration, and another 47 were cleared for release by the Obama Administration. Of those 87, 23 are known to be from Yemen. Yemen has apparently demanded payment of $200M to repatriate their citizens, but the US has only offered $20M to Yemen. In contrast, nearly all of the 133 Saudi detainees that had been cleared for release have been returned to Saudia Arabia during the Bush Administration.
It is not known much about the situation with the other detainees, but many assume similar negociations with other countries for their repatriation have been stalled on similar issues (mostly monetary). I think of it as a reverse-ransom. That isn't an excuse for continuing to hold them, but it is apparently one of the big reasons.
Sadly, it merely disabled user web surfing (HTTP traffic) to allow the malware on your PC full access to your internet bandwidth... No need for that pesky user web surfing tying up your pipe when you have a botnet to manage...;^)
Editor promotes trollish article written by an anonymous reader...
Okay, given that I don't think it's ever fair to anthrpomorphize an idea (or in this case an article or summary) as having an opinon, whose opinon is this?
My conclusion is simply that this editor thinks that a the US should let foreigners into US schools, but wants to maintain a sense of plausible deniablity...
The lithium battery is supplied from the Japanese company GS Yuasa. This company was chosen by Thales (the 787 subcontractor chosen by Boeing for the Electrical Power Conversion System). FWIW, this has been in the news lately as the stock of this company rose shortly after it was announced that the battery wasn't likely defective.
I'm an EE, but not a battery expert, but a quick glance indicates this is a fairly vanilla Lithium Cobalt Oxide Cathode technology which is the most common (probably similar to the chemistry used in your laptop or cell phone battery). Also, by all accounts these folks seem to be a competent battery supplier (they've apparently flown batteries in satellites and got a contract for the international space station).
Short answer is that I suspect the physics is not new, but something related to something we think we qualitatively know, but we don't really know how to bound the computational errors correctly in a complicated system.
AFAIK, the QED computation techniques that are used to compute bound state of a proton (often modified ordered pertubation methods) aren't particularly convergent so many shortcuts are taken (e.g., use orders of different quantities like non-relativistic velocity, etc). By using a muon and a proton (instead of an electron and a proton), we are essentially replacing something we know more about (the electron) with something we know less about (muon), to try and compute something about something we don't know much about (the proton). Since we don't know much about protons yet, I believe most computations of the bound state are currently just assuming things about them (charge is a point source, nothing about quarks). I haven't read the paper yet, so it's hard to know what they are doing in the QED corrections.
Maybe there is a slight chance that this simplistic system (muon+proton) can macroscopically exhibit something that hints that QCD confinement inside a proton or muon isn't perfect (e.g, the heavy quarks sortof show themselves in a way that we can measure) which would be some interesting new gluon physics that is currently beyond our particle collider reach. But in some ways this might just show us that the QED based adjustments we are making aren't good enough for the real system and we need some even harder to dream up QCD adjustments and it's hard to say that this would definitly be new physics, but perhaps just new math on old QCD physics....
Slashdot Mirror
It's a bit more complicated than that...
For those not familar with what is going on in the video compression standards group, there were 2 independent efforts: HEVC (the so-called high-efficiency video codec to update H.264) and the IVC (internet video codec). IVC was not meant to replace HEVC, but be optimized for internet applications. Many folks seem to be confusing these in their responses.
One of the goals for IVC was for it to acheive so-called "type-1" licensing (basically free-as-in-beer) which would require all those that contribute to the standard to freely licence their patents. Of course the ISO/IEC groups that standardize this stuff (aka the MPEG group) cannot assure that the standard is free of patents, but only that no contributor to the standard will charge for the use of their patents in conjunction with the use of the standard.
The original baseline for IVC was a stripped down version of MPEG2 (basically MPEG1++ or MPEG2-- depending on your point of view) that was thought to be unencumbered by patents (MPEG1 is really old and some of the patents that cover it are even older and expired). Google submitted their VP8 for consideration for IVC. Needless to say, the ITM (IVC Test Model used to experiment with IVC) didn't perform very well relative to the more modern VP8 in recent comparison tests in Bit-Distortion modeling.
I would venture to guess that Google decided that it needed to clear the air with MPEG-LA (not related to ISO/IEC, but a separate patent-pool/licensing company created by the owners of the patents of original MPEG standard and some other corporations) so that it did not hinder its proposal for being considered as the baseline IVC codec for the test model.
Lest folks think that current VP8 is going to get through unscathed by the MPEG group, I believe that they will warp it a bit so that it isn't exactly the same as the current VP8 (as that's what the ISO/IEC group's charter is to develop new standards). That's one of the reasons why Microsoft didn't try to standardize WM9/10 codecs with the ISO/IEC standards body and they instead went to SMPTE (which has a history of just stamping "standard" on proprietary implementations). Unsuprisingly, SMPTE dutifuly stamped Microsoft's codec as SMPTE 421M (aka VC-1) w/o any substantial changes.
Myth 1: Xscale was somehow the best ARM at the time.
Xscale was basically inherited by Intel from DEC StrongArm (which arguably might have been the best at their time back in 1996), but by the time Intel bought it and rebadged it Xscale, it was pretty middling Arm implementation.
Myth 2: Intel sold it to Freescale (they actually sold it to Marvel).
There is a common misconception that somehow CCD imagers are superior to CMOS imagers in general. In reality, the only main advantage of CCD imagers is that the process technology available to them have the ability to be more sensitive in the near IR range (by increasing the epi-layer thickness). In addition CCD imagers have some special techiques available to them for low-noise gain (electron multiplication and temporal delay integration) that don't have similar low-noise counterparts in CMOS imager (since CMOS conversion circuits are more voltage oriented than electron/current oriented and doing circuit operation on voltages is more noisy than on currents/electrons).
However, if your application doesn't avail themselves of using these techniques most of which are only interesting in extremely-low-light applications (like astronomy), many digital CCD sensor images will end up inferior to their CMOS counterparts. On an CCD, the analog/digital conversion circuitry generally need to have higher bandwidth (because they can't be integrated as easily with the sensor array, you are wire limited and must timeshare the wires for readout and thus need to read-out faster) and higher bandwidth A/Ds have more noise negating much of the CCD advantages. In a CMOS sensor counterparts, the a/d conversion circuitry is more parallel and can be designed for lower-bandwidth and thus lower overall noise (because you aren't amplifying the high-frequency noise).
There is also the general result that CMOS sensor development rides on the coattails of high-volume production characterization of parametric values (because of cell-phones), whereas CCDs being much higher power current-operation devices are not as economically attractive to high-volume markets and thus tend to have low-production runs and suffer more variance in parameteric values.
Replace dog, with a cellphone and you could make a similar case...
Mostly, it was the cellphones that approched humans. Early cellphones that were clunky and not user friendly would likely be discarded by humans, those that were bold and user friendly were likely to be tolerated. In a few generations, those cellphones that were user friendly became distinctive from their clunky counterparts with touch glass, accelerometers, and retina screens. As cell phone owners, we take for granted that our cellphones can understand our gestures and requests, but that's something that even our closest relatives — chimpanzees and bonobos — can't read our gestures as readily as cellphones can. With this new ability, these cellphones were worth owning. People who had cellphones during a trip would likely have had an advantage over those who didn't. Finally when times were tough, cellphones could have served as an emergency money supply (you can fence them) and once humans realized the usefulness of keeping cellphones as emergency money, it was not a huge jump to realize tablets could be used in a similar way. This is the secret to the genius of cellphones: It's when cellphones join forces with us that they become special. Cellphones may even have been the catalyst for our modern civilization.
Therefore: Cellphones sought out humans and domesticated us? Stupid.... or is it stupid? ;^)
HDCP (the drm stuff) is essentially licenced from Intel. Intel only basically agreed to allow HDCP to be used on DVI and HDMI (originally) and only reluctantly allowed it for DisplayPort only after Intel's competing technolgy went bust (and vesa basically threatened to use another drm scheme which intel would then have to license).
Since it's unlikely that intel would have licenced HDCP to Apple for this purpose, it's likely that Apple was forced to use their own drm scheme between the lightning port to the hdmi dongle to comply with the licencing requirement for external monitor connections and the only way they could deploy it was to have a chip made to implement it or put it in software on an ARM chip.
Anybody knows why they'll carry so much cargo back? [yes, please google that for me]
I'm sure you are familiar with the concept of conservation of mass. What do you think they do with the mass they launch up there? convert it to energy using a Mr. Fusion? Or do you think they would just jettison 2000lbs into some random orbit? One of the biggest logistical challenges the ISS has, is that w/o the Space Shuttle, there has been limited "downmass" capability.
Although most of the downmass is the results of experiements and broken/obsolete equipment, all the garbage and of course the "digested" food they take up there need to come back down to the ground too. Just like camping in many remote national parks, if you pack it in, you must pack it out (poop included).
Instead of asking how to educate people, I think we need to come to grips with what people want when they say they want education.
At a personal level, although there is a vague notion that somehow education is important, it's likely that the thing most important to individual people about an education is not the fact or skills that are obtained, but certification that is conveyed and the value of that certification in societal status. If this is indeed true, the root desire for most folks in obtaining an education is differentiation (presumably from the "uneducated" masses). Could this differentiation be achieved by simply learning a set of facts and/or skills? Or does much of the value come in the form of the certification?
At a societal level, there are some economic benefits to having masses know enough facts and learn enough skills to create value in the economy and to allow the citizenry at large to reap the benefits of a relatively better economy (even those that don't know the facts or nor learned the skills).
So to this end, governments often invest in elements of a certified education to assist in the efficiency of the economy (e.g., allow more optimal allocation of workers to enterprises, and a more learned workforce in general). But to whom specifically does it confer most of the value of this investment? Bestowing rewards to the "smart", and "motivated" are perhaps easy calls for the highest levels of certification, but what about the masses? Or the motivated parents (wealthy or not) that wish to buy status for their children? Things get a bit dicey and politically incorrect from there since it is not possible to grant differentiation to everyone (by definition of differentiation).
For the masses, the conventional wisdom is to create a process we call education where the people can be taught the facts and skills and be certified for their accomplishment. This has the unspoken assumption that most anyone can be taught and that the certification has value.
Hopefully we can all see the flaw in this. If everyone can be taught, there is little to no differentiation and the certification has little value (other than the recipient has already been taught). You can see this today in the mainstream job market: HS diplomas are almost meaningless. Does that mean everyone can be taught, or does it mean the certification of the facts and skills indicated by a HS diploma are non-differentiating. Does improving teaching improve this situation in either case? Probably not.
The real value in improving teaching is not to help us individual students learn, but at a societal level to improve the economy. How do you measure this? Probably this is only measured in aggregate which is an evaluation mechanism that students, teachers, and people who study the education processes tend to discount as they concentrate on the achievement of the individual.
So do we do away with the notion of a certified education? My feeling is that will reduce the efficiency in the economy. All enterprises would need to develop their own training and evaluation criteria and job seekers will probably be less likely to present meaningful credentials to prospective new employers.
If we stick with the concept of a certified education, what are we certifying? If you believe in "tests" as a sole means of evaluation, that might be easy to answer, but if you believe (as I do) that learning is more than the sum of facts and skills, it's hard to say that you can successfully replace teachers with ipads and present a meaningful certification result.
For example, when I interview a college graduate that didn't drop out, I know that at least they could put up with a hierarchical institutional environment for 4 years and were able to do sufficient amount of learning to make academic progress. Since I desire them to stay in my company and contribute for more than a few years if I hire them and spend the resources to train them, that's an important nugget of information right there independent o
unless they borrowed it from the treasury, tax payers dont pay for it.
plus there's that whole thing about having to pay back whatever you borrow.
Since this manuver reduces the effective tax rate of the gross earnings***, the net result is that the US treasury gets less tax revenue for the same amount of gross earnings. Since the US government doesn't seem to be able to reduce spending, it must borrow more money than if it had gotten the tax revenues which costs the US tax payers.
Net result: US tax payers pay for the tax reduction received by the Costco shareholders.
*** basically, by borrowing the money (at a currently very low interest rate), Costco converts the taxable date of future revenue to TY2012. Although the shareholder pays this tax now, this was done to take advantage of a lower rate due to "bush" taxcuts. If that revenue was recognized in TY2013 or later it would would be part of the valuation of the company/stock and/or part of a future dividend would be subject to a higher future tax rate....
FYI, The founder of Costco (Jim Sinegal) retired as CEO in January 2012. Although he remains on the board of directors, the reigns have been passed to another insider Craig Jelinek...
Lest you think Costco is all about bucking Wall Street, you should know that they borrowed (yes borrowed) $3.5Billion (with a 'B') to pay out a special dividend to shareholders ahead of the tax increase that is scheduled to take place this year. This typical short term Wall Street manuever no doubt just transfered almost a billion or so from the US treasury to Costco shareholders (and probably didn't do much to help the employees or customers who as taxpayers will be forced to help fund this manuever).
When a person resigns, they are not eligible for unemployment insurance.
That's not really true. A friend of mine runs a small business in silicon valley (Fremont), and one of her workers quit and moved with her husband 60 miles away to Stockton. When she applied for unemployment, California classified this as "voluntary quit with good cause" and granted her full benefits even though her husband was commuting from Stockton to Milpitas (about 5 miles from Fremont) every day. After 3 protests with the mediation board and eventually a full hearing with the board, the inital ruling didn't change.
My friend was not necessarily trying to invalidate her benefits, just trying to avoid the ex-worker's UI benefits charged to her UI account which caused her UI premiums to rise, but of course CA being broke they certainly wanted to bill her UI benefits to some company and not the general funds, so I guess all this protest was futile.
Short story, unemployment benefits can be granted for just about any reason you can convice a bunch of government bureaucrats is a good reason. Don't believe that whole "when you quit, you don't get unemployment benefits" nonsense. I'm guessing that changing the terms of employment causing travelling or relocation hardship will definitely be judged as "voluntary quit with good cause" and eligible for full benefits.
http://www.edd.ca.gov/uibdg/Voluntary_Quit_VQ_5.htm
The only question is what happens with cross-state employment (e.g., say an employee in Nebraska). I'm not so sure they are eligible for CA unemployment, so they would have to apply for unemployment in their own state (or country), which may not be so lenient (or generous) with UI benefits.
In California, tenure comes after two years.
Although you are "tenured" (removed from probationary status) after two years, that doesn't mean you can't be furloughed. All tenure does is secure your spot on the bottom of the senority list for your school. If you are near the bottom of that list and the school district needs to layoff some-number of teachers, you probably still lose your job. Moving to a new school district will start the clock again.
With the current budgetary environment in California, this isn't a merely theoretical, it is what is happening to nearly all recently hired teachers. Even surviving to tenure, nearly all people on the bottom of the senority list get layoff notices every year until the districts figure out their budget, and hire most (but not all) of them back. Young, enthusiastic, qualified teachers (including several who were friends of mine) are leaving the state for more stable job opportunities elsewhere.
Basically, tenure doesn't mean much in the CA system. Non-tenured means simply the probationary period (kind of like a teacher internship) is still going on. Basically it's all about senority with teachers.
Of course nobody like a layoff, but real organizations (including non-profit organizations) would use an unfortuante layoff opportunity to clean house, where as schools are forced to simply sacrifice the future for today.
Even silicon area isn't that impressive - a good dSLR will have a camera sensor with a large silicon area. Hell, there are FPGAs with just as big silicon dies as well.
Not all technologies are comparable...
Canon's APS-H sensor is 550mm^2, it has ~120Mpixels which about 4 transistors/pixels isn't very dense (mostly photodiode area).
State of the art DRAM is 4Gbit which at about 2 transistors/bit is only 8G transistors.
Samsung's leading edge NAND flash chip is the TLC (triple level cell or 3bits/transistor) 17.2B transistor chip (about 48Gibits and generally high-density flash drives are built out of several lower-density chips and a flash drive controller chip).
Intel's Ivy bridge processor has 1.4B transistors on a 160mm^2 die and their 10-core Xeon has 2.6B transistors.
Xylinx Virtex-7 2000T FPGA has 6.8B transistors (but it uses stacked silicon interconnect 2.5D technology)
It may not be at the limit of wafer technology, but it's right up there with the Xylinx Virtex-7 2000T...
However, you may not be aware, that random defect density often isn't the only limiter to die size. There are also limits to the reticle size and the stepper. Often you have run-out limited, alignment-limited or stepper-limited sizes to stamping out die on a wafer. For TSMC, that limit is generally about 600mm^2 (intel apparently can do 700mm^2), so 551mm^2 is pretty close to maxing this out. Thus if you could patten a wafer scale device you would eventually reach the random defect density limited yield limit, however, long before this, the current stepper photo-lithographic alignment technology will have been greatly exceeded.
Just imagine, blowing up a forest, but with Lens Flares.
FTFY...
I may be recalling this incorrectly, but I think Steve Jobs did something like sell all his shares when he got kicked out of Apple...
I don't know about PeerJ specifically, but typically the editor (or more generally, editorial board desginees) for the journal selects the specific reviewer(s) for a paper. They don't just hold up a paper and ask for volunteers for a specific paper. To execute the strategy of signing up a bunch of shills and hoping that the editor will randomly select them, and nobody who would actually do a legitimate peer-review, is probably not going to be a very good long term strategy if the editors aren't in cahoots, although it might occasionally work for a very obscure topic.
On the other hand, that's no worse than the situation today (the more obsure the research, the more cooperative backscratching there is).
The bigger problem I see is how to entice quality peer-review volunteers. Traditional Journals entice peer-reviewers by offering stuff like book vouchers, or free access for a few weeks per reviewed article and/or free access to all references in the paper during the peer review duration. If it costs nothing to access the journal, these traditional enticements don't have any value. As I understand it, to make up for this, they are forcing members to "volunteer" to review at least 1 time per year (or at least comment on a public submission). I don't see how this would be very effective out of the gate, but as with the /. moderation system, I'm sure it will be tweaked over time...
FWIW, it seems that PeerJ is apparently currently only Biology and Medical Science Journal (not a true megajournal). Journals in those fields tend to have the most egregious pricing scales and have the most annoying editorial boards (because there are limited publishing options). I'm sure that's a deliberate marketing ploy (hit the Journal industry where it's the most vunerable).
Maybe...
She went to university in Bonn ....Minsk!
Whose sister city is
(of course Tom Leher copied from Danny Kaye's Stanislavsky sketch from the Jack Benny show, but he gave him credit)
FWIW, in some modern ICs (that I've worked on) the most critical parts of a rom (e.g., a boot loader that validates a pre-boot image), are generally not implemented as a masked rom, but basically compiled gates. The logic compiler (more often than not the program called Design Compiler from Synopsys) is given the contents of the rom described as a big case statement: given an address, assign data output. The compiler produces a semi-optimal set of logic gates to implement the 'ROM' function.
During the layout process, a big batch of spare gates is heaped into the mess in case a metal-mask patch is required. To create the patch, a complex tool is used to recompile the gates, using the constraints that only existing gates are used to create the patch. Although it sounds like a magical tool, most large semiconductor companies have such tools (often called ECO or engineering-change-order tools) to allow them to make small logical changes in a chip to fix small bugs in a few metal masks to avoid going through a whole chip refabrication that changes which gates are used (basically the same idea as a masked rom). For those software folks among us, think about the ECO tool as the hardware analogy of a tool that automates return-oriented programming (ROP).
Since the result is just a pile of gates and not a regular grid, it has the effect of retrieving the contents really difficult to automate from a visual inspection point of view (almost as difficult as the Logic-vs-schematic design verification process except now you have to create the schematic from pictures from different layers on the chip).
On the other hand, that is usually not the weakest link in the system. As mentioned, if the embedded processor can read the rom, it can be often tricked into doing so by being run in a debug mode, so this is only one piece of the security puzzle.
'Big Al' didn't get IP from the 'ergs from mass' thing.
But 'Big Al' did patent a refrigerator... (e.g., US patent #1781541)
How is Dell already reporting is 2013 third quarter? Exactly what calendar dates are covered by that quarter?
In the US, large corporation are allowed to define their own fiscal "year" for financial reporting as long as it is constitent with the rules (basically it must be 52-53 weeks long and close at the end of a month or a day of the week). Dell uses a fiscal year that ends on the friday nearest to january 31st. Often corporations choose fiscal years to match with other similar companies, or to smooth out revenue reporting (e.g., say Q3 captures all of the christmas revenue, minus the returns). The number is set by the year of the 4th quarter.
For example, the US government uses the following fiscal year for FY2013
1st quarter: 1 October 2012 – 31 December 2012
2nd quarter: 1 January 2013 – 31 March 2013
3rd quarter: 1 April 2013 – 30 June 2013
4th quarter: 1 July 2013 – 30 September 2013
Small nit. As I understand it, one of the main reasons the US is not returning people declared innocent back to their homes, is that those countries don't seem to want them back, and we don't want them here, and we haven't found a country willing to take them... Therefore... That's where we stand today.
For example, apparently 40 were cleared for release by Bush Administration, and another 47 were cleared for release by the Obama Administration. Of those 87, 23 are known to be from Yemen. Yemen has apparently demanded payment of $200M to repatriate their citizens, but the US has only offered $20M to Yemen. In contrast, nearly all of the 133 Saudi detainees that had been cleared for release have been returned to Saudia Arabia during the Bush Administration.
It is not known much about the situation with the other detainees, but many assume similar negociations with other countries for their repatriation have been stalled on similar issues (mostly monetary). I think of it as a reverse-ransom. That isn't an excuse for continuing to hold them, but it is apparently one of the big reasons.
Thus making Windows XP completely secure!
Sadly, it merely disabled user web surfing (HTTP traffic) to allow the malware on your PC full access to your internet bandwidth... ;^)
No need for that pesky user web surfing tying up your pipe when you have a botnet to manage...
Editor promotes trollish article written by an anonymous reader...
Okay, given that I don't think it's ever fair to anthrpomorphize an idea (or in this case an article or summary) as having an opinon, whose opinon is this?
My conclusion is simply that this editor thinks that a the US should let foreigners into US schools, but wants to maintain a sense of plausible deniablity...
The lithium battery is supplied from the Japanese company GS Yuasa. This company was chosen by Thales (the 787 subcontractor chosen by Boeing for the Electrical Power Conversion System). FWIW, this has been in the news lately as the stock of this company rose shortly after it was announced that the battery wasn't likely defective.
You can read all about it on their website...
I'm an EE, but not a battery expert, but a quick glance indicates this is a fairly vanilla Lithium Cobalt Oxide Cathode technology which is the most common (probably similar to the chemistry used in your laptop or cell phone battery). Also, by all accounts these folks seem to be a competent battery supplier (they've apparently flown batteries in satellites and got a contract for the international space station).
Found this picture of an early prototype on the web manufactured way back in 1985 ;^)
http://www.imcdb.org/vehicle_49434-Citroen-DS-21-1972.html
I takes a "real genius" to come up with revolutionary technology like this...
Short answer is that I suspect the physics is not new, but something related to something we think we qualitatively know, but we don't really know how to bound the computational errors correctly in a complicated system.
AFAIK, the QED computation techniques that are used to compute bound state of a proton (often modified ordered pertubation methods) aren't particularly convergent so many shortcuts are taken (e.g., use orders of different quantities like non-relativistic velocity, etc). By using a muon and a proton (instead of an electron and a proton), we are essentially replacing something we know more about (the electron) with something we know less about (muon), to try and compute something about something we don't know much about (the proton). Since we don't know much about protons yet, I believe most computations of the bound state are currently just assuming things about them (charge is a point source, nothing about quarks). I haven't read the paper yet, so it's hard to know what they are doing in the QED corrections.
Maybe there is a slight chance that this simplistic system (muon+proton) can macroscopically exhibit something that hints that QCD confinement inside a proton or muon isn't perfect (e.g, the heavy quarks sortof show themselves in a way that we can measure) which would be some interesting new gluon physics that is currently beyond our particle collider reach. But in some ways this might just show us that the QED based adjustments we are making aren't good enough for the real system and we need some even harder to dream up QCD adjustments and it's hard to say that this would definitly be new physics, but perhaps just new math on old QCD physics....