'The lesson of the Facebook fiasco for Silicon Valley is clear. Start-up entrepreneurs cannot evade the discipline of the capital markets any more than can the prime ministers of Spain and Italy.'"
They were doing fine, and now they're not because of the IPO. Why isn't this lesson, 'just don't go public'?
Why not go public?
Instead of trying to get large institutions to "loan" you money in exchange for potentially worthless virtual sheets of paper (stock certificates), you now allow your institutional investors to foist them on the unexpecting public. Assuming you are making money yourself and don't need any more "loans", you can essentially continue to dillute your virtual sheets of paper by inflation to tease your employees and tide you over any rough spots (unless the whole house of cards comes falling down). If the company didn't go public, they couldn't easily play that inflation game with your virtual sheets of paper (institutional investors aren't as forgiving, and employees aren't teased as easily).
1. Who cares, my stock is worth only 1 million instead of 2 million, I can live with that.
2. Who cares, my stock is only worth 25 million instead of 50 million (plus whatever bonuses I get for being a board member and then leaving)
You forgot another category...
3. Employees that joined more recently doing the bulk of the work*** or are potentially the future of the company... Might care as they probably have seen the share price dangerously near their strike price, (or possibly even underwater), and might decide to leave for greener pastures...
*** now that some of the long timers are sitting pretty on their millions and care less than they used to about work, they needs someone to pick up the slack and it's probably someone that joined more recently.
Paterno protected a child molester! It's pretty sick that you would make a false equivalence between molesting children and telling a dirty joke.
Perhaps you may have assumed it was an equivalence to that very sad situation, but was in fact alluding to a generall attitude of Mr Paterno, not an event (and not that specific event).
Paterno seems to have had a general dismissive attitude concerning punishments for sexual assult and other transgressions promulgated by his players*** and reportedly often butted heads with ex-vice president of student affairs Vicky Triponey on how to discipline player caught violating student rules (and was likely the cause of getting her fired). This type of dismissive attitude generally starts small and gets contagious in an organization to the point where you can start to overlook bigger and bigger things. As a leader, they set the tone for the organization. If the manager/leader trivializes potentially serious transgressions, it is probably inevitable some less evolved followers in the organization might consider that a green light.
On the other hand, Paterno also had a reputation for being at least a little bit sexist himself (e.g., telling dirty jokes and then appologizing for them when he discovered he was in mixed company). He also was a big protester against having women sports reporters.
** here's an example of a quote of his on this subject concerning one of his players accused of sexual assult...
“There’s some tough — there’s so many people gravitating to these kids. He may not have even known what he was getting into, Nicholson. They knock on the door; somebody may knock on the door; a cute girl knocks on the door. What do you do?”
“Geez. I hope — thank God they don’t knock on my door because I’d refer them to a couple of other rooms,” Paterno continued. “But that’s too bad. You hate to see that. I really do. You like to see a kid end up his football career. He’s a heck of a football player, by the way; he’s a really good football player. And it’s just too bad.”
I think we're going to be stuck in the same ghz range until we're past silicon.
That's what I remember being told, anyway...
Even when we get past "silicon", there are some fundamental issues that will likely constrain clock-speeds things until we solve them.
First, the design of small low power devices (e.g, switching transistors) is currently problematic. Minimum sized geometries tend to "leak" more power, and potential subsitutes for silicon that are faster also tend to have leakier transistors (like graphene). We can make the devices bigger to minimize this, but then they switch slower, and there is more distance to traverse between devices. This is problematic in that the perf per watt tradeoff isn't great if you are doubling the watts to get 50% more perf (as an example), sometimes it doesn't make sense to go so fast.
Second, we are reaching manufacturability limits. Today, one of the biggest problems with silicon is parametric yield loss. This is basically device-to-device variation of circuit parameters due to manufacturing variation. This requires quite a bit of over-engineering of margin which reduces the ability to use any of the intrinsic speed advances. We are now using nearly every trick in the book to get small devices that lay down stuff where you can count the dimensions of some features in atoms on your fingers and toes, so parametric yield loss due to + or - one atom dimension average change causing a 5-10% variation isn't likely to go way very soon.
Third, re-syncronization uncertainty is now a big problem and getting worse. If a re-synchronizer circuit (say one that harmonizes two sides of an asynchronous fifo across 2 clock domains running at the same nominal frequency) is designed so that it would only fail 1-in-a-million times, you could have a reasonable failure-rate by cascading a few of them. If you are running 10 or 100 times faster, that's not a scalable strategy. Nowdays, even the jitter from a phase-locked and delay-locked loops or from two slightly mismatched clock-trees on different parts of a chip can be several clock periods long so what used to be a fairly simple syncrhonization problem now would likely be 10-100 times harder if it was 10-100 times faster (jitter isn't improving as fast as the potential clock rate).
Of course if we stop using electrons in lattices for computational circuits (e.g., use photons in crystals), and developed new structured circuit realization technologies that allowed reducing some of the engineering margins required to yield devices, some of these limitations might be solved in different ways, but those types of advances are probably quite far off... I'm willing to wager, that we will start to leverage alternate computation technologies (e.g., like ubiquitous parallel operation, or even quantum) before we get there, so maybe going so fast won't seem as critical as it does today...
1) Does it run Linux? 2) I for one, would like to welcome our new register constrained overlord. 3) Can you imagine a Beowulf cluster of these? 4) In Soviet Russia supercomputer run YOU! 5) There is no God, I reject your fairytales.
Why? The reason is complicated, but it really boils down to what collectively we have decided to be for the public good. Why integrate races at work? Why integrate women at work? Why integrate italians at work? Why integrate handicapped people at work? Why integrate catholics or jews at work? Why integrate homosexuals at work? And if we allow them to work, but make life for them difficult so that they self seggregate (so-called separate, but equal) is that okay?
Some folks would agree and some would disagree with this, but when you boil it down, that is the reason: just because we said so. For some things the collective has decided to say things were important, and that is the rule. You may not like the rule, but the collective wisdom is that the societal benefits of providing equal employment opportunities trumps your rights in a small group to discriminate in certain protected groups and that wisdom has be codified into law in the United States. The justification is that the government is responsible for providing the opportunity for everyone to succeed, not just your little group.
Apparently these people (including the manager) are not actually professionals. Promulgating an environment where you are just "protecting-my-guys" because "we-are-getting-the-job-done" and "I-know-better-than-a-bunch-of-adminstrators" is basically what Joe Paterno did. Yeah, that worked great for him for a while, but it isn't a professional environment, and it's one waiting for the shoe to drop.
Longer answer: The amount of energy that we use is a small fraction of the amount of energy that the earth receives from our nearest star (aka the sun). The heat we create from the energy that we use is also a small fraction of the heat the earth retains from the sun and the earth retains in its molten core. So if we are doing something to change the amount of heat we retain from the energy we receive from the sun** with different sources of power, it could certainly make a difference.
Of course the $64G question: does buring carbon based fuels significantly change the amount of heat we retain on earth? Probably (that is the whole AGW debate). Of course we don't know for sure, but there is some evidence that it is true, but the bigger picture may be that things totally out of our control (e.g., volcanos, meteors, solar variation, etc), may in the end drown out our effect, but that doesn't mean the effect isn't there.
**for completeness, we might also consider the distribution of the heat between the surface and the molten core, but to be fair, other than the trivial amount of geothermal energy we use, there's a negligible amount to think about here.
So what makes this the boomers fault rather than bad system design?
One can make many assumptions here:
- boomers helped design the system. - boomers knew the system was broken and could have fixed it, but didn't. - boomers should have know the system was broken and fixed it, but were clueless. - system was designed by some god, and we have no free will and can't change it, and boomers broke the system. - boomers want to blame broken system on someone else.
Pick one or two of the above. Then we can discuss.
Why do so many proponents of climate change mainstream resort to name calling? I think it's a rhetorical tactic, to appear uncompromising and intimidating. But at the same time, it undermines credibility -- it seems like you have nothing to say and are falling back on tactics.
FTFY. Not that I don't belive in unavoidable climate change that will affect our way of life. I just object in principle to agreeing with people that call other people that don't agree with them uneducated idiots.
That's too bad. I can't believe they make you run DOS!
Just be happy that they didn't make you run xenix... That command-line version of unix was so "good" that even though SCO bought it, they eventually threw it away;^):^p
I see a problem. Although engineers usually have large safety margins, the margin is only relative to the known data at the time. Over 40-60 years, better data points become available which may not have been apparent when the original margin was computed resulting in a much smaller real margin.
The problem: although people can do recomputations for the problem that are obvious to newcomers (a 35yo experienced engineer 60 years later is 95yo consulting engineer long retired or dead), how many built-in assumptions did the original designers make that weren't thought to be critical design issues are now violated by new information? Probably quite a few. How will this likely be addressed? By ignoring this issue because is it too expensive to address.
Your attitude is similar to what was pointed to in the Challenger report, appendix F. To paraphrase: If it is true that if the reliability was so high that it could handle 120 years, it would take an inordinate number of tests to determine it (you would get nothing but a string of perfect results from which no precise figure, other than that the probability is likely more than the number of years so far). But, if the real probability of failure is not so small, similar reactors would show troubles, near failures, and possible actual failures with a reasonable number of trials and standard statistical methods could give a reasonable estimate.
However, sometime people attribute the lack of actual failure as proving the design and "go-with-their-gut" instead of using available statistical methods to do real analysis change the definition of margin to justify their conclusions.
Given the number of reactors is small and we have seen trouble and near failures in some reactors of similar design already (such as the one pointed out by this article), perhaps this estimate is a bit optimistic? Just sayn...
So the Boson makes up the field, or the field makes up the Boson? How can something be made up of itself?
Although it is not technically correct, the way I like to think about it is virtual Bosons make up the field, and the field is from what the Boson is created. In some situations the virtual Bosons can be converted to real Boson which completes the circle... Virtual Bosons seem to be mostly just the accounting trick for balancing in quantized field unit interactions, but with the proper situation, just like monetary accounting tricks, you can convert that back into the real thing;^)
Did they start making the Tesla Roadster again!?!?!?
I thought they halted the production of the good car in their line to concentrate on 'family cars'....
[rolls eyes]
AFAIK, the original roadster appears to have a couple strikes against it that made continued production problematic. First, since Lotus and Tesla didn't agree to extend the production contract, apparently, Lotus decided to schedule to retool the factory after the intial production run. Second, being a limited production car, they were able to get a temporary exemption from US rules requiring advanced airbags, but that expired at the end of 2011, so they could only sell new production outside the US. Also, it appears that tesla lost money with each roadster sold (too much manual assembly and rework). With these three strikes, it just wasn't worth it to continue with the original roadster.
They still seem to be planning for a new roadster based on a shorten S body... Sadly, an updated roadster does not appear to be scheduled for production before 2014.
You may be a manager, and you might want feedback when people leave, but you aren't the one getting the information, some HR person is getting the feedback during the exit interview.
If you hear any of the feedback (and you usually won't), it will be first filtered through both HR management and your own manager (telephone game style) and recorded for posterity for any of your future performance reviews. Still think you want people to give their feedback to HR in exit interviews? Yeah...
FWIW, a "good" manager from an employee's point of view isn't necessarily the same as a "good" manager from upper management's point of view. Good managers from an employee's point of view don't need to beg their employees for feedback, and if they do get feedback they hopefully are people-oriented enough to read between the lines. If they can't even read their direct reports, they probably have no idea how to read the upper management very well either and that isn't gonna be very good for their direct reports in the long-run (and then they by definition won't be very good managers from the employee's point of view even if upper management loves them). Of course it's possible to be a "good" (or "bad") from both points of view, but from my experience, they generally are independent variables that aren't correlated at all. Just my opinion...
Can we put a breeder reactor on Mars? That would certainly resolve the issue of refueling and would give Martians long term energy security. And I can't imagine we'd need to worry about nuclear proliferation or dirty bombs on Mars.
Well it is obvious that if we actually can get a standard reactor on mars, we could instead put a breeder reactor, but maybe we really won't want to do this.
I think many people have a misunderstanding about breeder reactors. They are not magic fire-and-forget nearly-perpetual energy machines. The benefit of breeder reactors is that they have extra neutrons available flying around to make nuclear fuel from what is called fertile material (e.g., U238) which it converts to fissile material (e.g., P239) which it can then use as fuel after reprocessing***. Generally, most common breeder reactors need to have the fuel reprocessed (usually a very nasty industrial chemical separation process more complicated that standard U235/U238 separation) to achieve their benefit. The built in assumption of a breeder is that it is cheaper to reprocess than find and mine new uranium to refine. This certainly hasn't turned out to be true on earth (but maybe it might be true on mars, hard to say)...
Also, known breeder reactors are all "fast-neutron" reactors (e.g, they don't slow down the chain-reaction neutrons very much so that they can escape the core to breed a surrounding blanket of fertile fuel). This means they need different coolant system (usually liquid sodium). It is unforutnate that nobody has seemed to come up with a cooling scheme for a breeder that has very good safety properties. With a typical reactor, if you lose water and cooling, like Fukishima, then neutrons don't slow down and at least the chain reaction slows/stops (as on average fast neutrons are then easier absorbed by the bulk of the U238 in the fuel, than the 5% of U235 which would chain so it's essentially sort of breeding instead of chaining when the neutron-slowing water is lost). In current cooling systems for breeders, since it's designed to chain w/ or w/o coolant to slow down the neutrons, you don't get this inherent safety property. This requires extra safeguards to prevent core explosions (as opposed to just core meltdown from the residual heat). Also liquid metal coolants tend to get highly radioactive when exposed to this level of fast neutron flux, so that makes it a very tough material science problem to get high reliability in the cooling system (soduim fires are the biggest problem with breeder reactors on earth).
It seems to me that it would be better to have a more reliable reactor design and spend effort at getting better fuel efficiency for the fuel you have (higher fuel burnup percentage), without relying on a breeder w/ reprocessing for a small colony that didn't want to invest in maintaining complicated industrial processes.
**If you don't consider reprocessing, even standard nuclear reactors "breed" some amount of fuel which is immediatly "burned" (although they are not optimized for that). The most important measure of this is the "burn-up" percentage (an indication how much energy they extract from the fuel you have). Without fancy reprocessing, there isn't too much difference between a breeder reactor and the latest generation of high-burnup standard reactors.
My personal opinion is that this whole exercise isn't much different than asking a person if they thought the price of milk or the price of gas went up more in the last decade (or similar question).
I'd wager that most people wouldn't have any clue because the random person doesn't pay any attention to these things, so they would guess. That guess would likely not depend at all on any variable except their political beliefs.
I'm a bit surprised at the answer concerning the soil on mars and the presumed ease of creating a self sustaining agricultural development.
Plants that we know of need nitrogen in the soil and as far as I understand it, there really isn't a good source of nitrogen on mars (atmosphere 95% CO2, 3% N2 on mars, vs 78% N2 and 20% O2 on earth). On earth we have nitrogen-fixing bacteria, nitrogen-fixing plants (like legumes), and even fossil fuel powered fertilizer to help "fix"-nitrogen into the soil for growing plants, but in each of these cases, the source of nitrogen is from the air. Although decaying plants will release some of their nitrogen back into the soil, this isn't 100%, so energy-efficient recycling won't get you all you need to be sustaining and doesn't address how to get enough Nitrogen there to start with...
This would seem to be a really big impediment to creating a self sustaining agricultural development on mars until this problem is solved.
The war started when the south attacked Fort Sumter. Probably something else would have happened if that hadn't, but the north didn't just invade the south to prevent the seccession.
Fort Sumter was located in South Carolina territory. After South Carolina attempted to seccede, a couple US/union companies instead of retreating, essentially attempted to occupy the 1/2 completed Fort Sumter (which is on an island in charleston harbor in a critical location). The fighting broke out when after a couple of months of nothing happening, the Union army attempted to resupply the fort in South Carolina territory to attempt to keep the fort from the confederate hands.
Certainly something else might have happened to start the war (it seemed inveitable), but you make it sound like the north didn't invade the south to start the war. I'm not sure that statement jives with reality...
The slavery issue was the main reason for the north/south split, not the reason for the war...
The US Civil war was certainly about states rights. The north could have just let the southern states leave the union, but the north was not keen on having a resource rich, wealthy adversary nation right next to it that might align itself with Britian, France, and the native americans against the union. Of course there isn't just one reason for the US civil war, but this was the big deal.
To support this states rights view on the war, you only need to look at contemporaneous events like Emancipation Proclamation. Slaves were only freed in territories that were declared by to be in rebellion. Other slave slates that didn't seceed didn't have their slaves freed (Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri, Tennessee). If the war (not the split) was primarly caused by slavery, wouldn't the slave holding states still in the Union be affected by the slave issue? Nope, the primary goal was to get those rebellious states back into the Union.
we were at the same time giving lots of money to England in their fight against Germany
IIRC lending, not giving. They had to pay it back, and they eventually did.
Better review your history on lend-lease. Basically the US (and Canada) gave stuff to England for token payments (e.g. giving England 50 destroyer in "exchange" for lease payments for new US base locations to be located in former British colonies). Then after the war was over, the US depreciated the value of the lend-lease items by 90% (because now they were "used") and allowed England to "buy" them at the depreciated value with a 2% loan stretched out over 50 years.
Eventually, the residual of lend-lease was "paid" back on these terms on Dec 2006. Of course England could have paid it back earlier, but a 2% loan was a good deal and they of course paid it back in 50 year inflated money value...
If that kind of loan would have been made to members of congress, I think many people would have called it a gift... (e.g., lend them a $1M house, depreciate it 90% in 4 years, give them the opportunity to buy it for $100K with a 2% 50 year loan) What would you call it?
I'm not saying we shouldn't have done it, just calling a spade a spade. That whole lend-lease fiction was just to do an end-around the isolationist republican congress. It wasn't reality...
[W]e weren't broke during WWII and the Civil War was not about slavery.
Actually we were pretty broke during WWII. Remember WWII was right after the great depression and many think it was the event that allowed us to pull out of the depression. The US treasury debt was ~$40B in 1941, and $250B in 1946 when the war ended. The US financed WWII with lots of warbonds...
FWIW, I don't think any historians would agree that we fought WWII to protect the rights of any people (other than US self interest). The US entered WWII to stop Japan from gaining too much influence in the Pacific (of course we were at the same time giving lots of money to England in their fight against Germany, but that wasn't really to protect their rights either). History records that it all came to head when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. The fact that Germany wanted to pick a direct fight with the US pretty much gave us no choice but to go over to Europe for real too...
And of course the Civil war wasn't about slavery, but states rights. Is it okay to secede from the union when you don't get your way? Apparently, no say the winners.
Drugs aren't the reason hospitals are so expensive. Hospitals mostly just pass on the cost of drugs to their patients (via their insurance companies). If two drugs cost $10 and $100, and the hospital wanted to charge you $100 to put a pill in a cup, you would likely be billed $110 and $200, respectively. The reason hospitals are so expensive ($100 to put a pill in a cup is not unheard of) is that they spend money on stuff (like medical equipment) that is overpriced and then need to bill it out. Hospitals also have to cover for uninsured treatment losses (mostly ER related).
As to why drugs are so expensive, well the main reason for that is that we've collectively decided to pay them in the US. Some other countries have decided otherwise.
Why have we decided to pay the high price for pills in the US? Well, it's of course complicated, but often it boils down to the fact that it is sometimes strangely cheaper to give someone a standard overpriced pill than have a high-priced doctor supervise a custom course of treatment. Thus insurance companies would rather pay a standardize price for a pill (that they can knock down the price, don't be fooled that they pay that price), than try to figure out how to cost out a non-standard treatment by a doctor.
Don't fool yourself, if some actuary in an insurance company thought it would be cheaper to pay for a custom doctor supervised treatment than to pay an over-inflated price for a pill, they would do it in a heartbeat. Thus, there is no incentive for the magic pill makers to drop their prices below the cost of equivalent doctor supervised treatment with using cheaper pills.
Let's be clear, I'm not saying that doctors and hospital and drug-companies aren't skimming off huge of profits, but most of the profit is a result of our desire to have the latest and greatest cool stuff (not unlike Apple). Those one-off stories about some patient not being able to afford some cancer therapy drug tug at the heartstrings, but in reality affects a very small part of their bottom line (many times, the drug companies just end up donating those drugs to kill the bad publicity). A drug like Lipitor, Humira, Nexium, and Viagra are the USD$1B drugs they are really concerned about and those are the ones that feed into the human desire for the latest and greatest and they are just charging what the market will bear...
The real question (in my mind) is how to stop the consolidation of the drug companies into multi-national monopolies (reducing competition) and generating entities that are too-big-to-fail (can't sue them out of existance, who will make the drugs)? That's is a general problem that has less to do with drug companies in specific, but all companies in general.
Slashdot Mirror
'The lesson of the Facebook fiasco for Silicon Valley is clear. Start-up entrepreneurs cannot evade the discipline of the capital markets any more than can the prime ministers of Spain and Italy.'"
They were doing fine, and now they're not because of the IPO. Why isn't this lesson, 'just don't go public'?
Why not go public?
Instead of trying to get large institutions to "loan" you money in exchange for potentially worthless virtual sheets of paper (stock certificates), you now allow your institutional investors to foist them on the unexpecting public. Assuming you are making money yourself and don't need any more "loans", you can essentially continue to dillute your virtual sheets of paper by inflation to tease your employees and tide you over any rough spots (unless the whole house of cards comes falling down). If the company didn't go public, they couldn't easily play that inflation game with your virtual sheets of paper (institutional investors aren't as forgiving, and employees aren't teased as easily).
1. Who cares, my stock is worth only 1 million instead of 2 million, I can live with that.
2. Who cares, my stock is only worth 25 million instead of 50 million (plus whatever bonuses I get for being a board member and then leaving)
You forgot another category...
3. Employees that joined more recently doing the bulk of the work*** or are potentially the future of the company... Might care as they probably have seen the share price dangerously near their strike price, (or possibly even underwater), and might decide to leave for greener pastures...
*** now that some of the long timers are sitting pretty on their millions and care less than they used to about work, they needs someone to pick up the slack and it's probably someone that joined more recently.
Paterno protected a child molester! It's pretty sick that you would make a false equivalence between molesting children and telling a dirty joke.
Perhaps you may have assumed it was an equivalence to that very sad situation, but was in fact alluding to a generall attitude of Mr Paterno, not an event (and not that specific event).
Paterno seems to have had a general dismissive attitude concerning punishments for sexual assult and other transgressions promulgated by his players*** and reportedly often butted heads with ex-vice president of student affairs Vicky Triponey on how to discipline player caught violating student rules (and was likely the cause of getting her fired). This type of dismissive attitude generally starts small and gets contagious in an organization to the point where you can start to overlook bigger and bigger things. As a leader, they set the tone for the organization. If the manager/leader trivializes potentially serious transgressions, it is probably inevitable some less evolved followers in the organization might consider that a green light.
On the other hand, Paterno also had a reputation for being at least a little bit sexist himself (e.g., telling dirty jokes and then appologizing for them when he discovered he was in mixed company). He also was a big protester against having women sports reporters.
** here's an example of a quote of his on this subject concerning one of his players accused of sexual assult...
“There’s some tough — there’s so many people gravitating to these kids. He may not have even known what he was getting into, Nicholson. They knock on the door; somebody may knock on the door; a cute girl knocks on the door. What do you do?”
“Geez. I hope — thank God they don’t knock on my door because I’d refer them to a couple of other rooms,” Paterno continued. “But that’s too bad. You hate to see that. I really do. You like to see a kid end up his football career. He’s a heck of a football player, by the way; he’s a really good football player. And it’s just too bad.”
I think we're going to be stuck in the same ghz range until we're past silicon.
That's what I remember being told, anyway...
Even when we get past "silicon", there are some fundamental issues that will likely constrain clock-speeds things until we solve them.
First, the design of small low power devices (e.g, switching transistors) is currently problematic. Minimum sized geometries tend to "leak" more power, and potential subsitutes for silicon that are faster also tend to have leakier transistors (like graphene). We can make the devices bigger to minimize this, but then they switch slower, and there is more distance to traverse between devices. This is problematic in that the perf per watt tradeoff isn't great if you are doubling the watts to get 50% more perf (as an example), sometimes it doesn't make sense to go so fast.
Second, we are reaching manufacturability limits. Today, one of the biggest problems with silicon is parametric yield loss. This is basically device-to-device variation of circuit parameters due to manufacturing variation. This requires quite a bit of over-engineering of margin which reduces the ability to use any of the intrinsic speed advances. We are now using nearly every trick in the book to get small devices that lay down stuff where you can count the dimensions of some features in atoms on your fingers and toes, so parametric yield loss due to + or - one atom dimension average change causing a 5-10% variation isn't likely to go way very soon.
Third, re-syncronization uncertainty is now a big problem and getting worse. If a re-synchronizer circuit (say one that harmonizes two sides of an asynchronous fifo across 2 clock domains running at the same nominal frequency) is designed so that it would only fail 1-in-a-million times, you could have a reasonable failure-rate by cascading a few of them. If you are running 10 or 100 times faster, that's not a scalable strategy. Nowdays, even the jitter from a phase-locked and delay-locked loops or from two slightly mismatched clock-trees on different parts of a chip can be several clock periods long so what used to be a fairly simple syncrhonization problem now would likely be 10-100 times harder if it was 10-100 times faster (jitter isn't improving as fast as the potential clock rate).
Of course if we stop using electrons in lattices for computational circuits (e.g., use photons in crystals), and developed new structured circuit realization technologies that allowed reducing some of the engineering margins required to yield devices, some of these limitations might be solved in different ways, but those types of advances are probably quite far off... I'm willing to wager, that we will start to leverage alternate computation technologies (e.g., like ubiquitous parallel operation, or even quantum) before we get there, so maybe going so fast won't seem as critical as it does today...
1) Does it run Linux?
2) I for one, would like to welcome our new register constrained overlord.
3) Can you imagine a Beowulf cluster of these?
4) In Soviet Russia supercomputer run YOU!
5) There is no God, I reject your fairytales.
6) ???
7) Profit!
Why? The reason is complicated, but it really boils down to what collectively we have decided to be for the public good. Why integrate races at work? Why integrate women at work? Why integrate italians at work? Why integrate handicapped people at work? Why integrate catholics or jews at work? Why integrate homosexuals at work? And if we allow them to work, but make life for them difficult so that they self seggregate (so-called separate, but equal) is that okay?
Some folks would agree and some would disagree with this, but when you boil it down, that is the reason: just because we said so. For some things the collective has decided to say things were important, and that is the rule. You may not like the rule, but the collective wisdom is that the societal benefits of providing equal employment opportunities trumps your rights in a small group to discriminate in certain protected groups and that wisdom has be codified into law in the United States. The justification is that the government is responsible for providing the opportunity for everyone to succeed, not just your little group.
Apparently these people (including the manager) are not actually professionals. Promulgating an environment where you are just "protecting-my-guys" because "we-are-getting-the-job-done" and "I-know-better-than-a-bunch-of-adminstrators" is basically what Joe Paterno did. Yeah, that worked great for him for a while, but it isn't a professional environment, and it's one waiting for the shoe to drop.
Short answer: it does matter.
Longer answer: The amount of energy that we use is a small fraction of the amount of energy that the earth receives from our nearest star (aka the sun). The heat we create from the energy that we use is also a small fraction of the heat the earth retains from the sun and the earth retains in its molten core. So if we are doing something to change the amount of heat we retain from the energy we receive from the sun** with different sources of power, it could certainly make a difference.
Of course the $64G question: does buring carbon based fuels significantly change the amount of heat we retain on earth? Probably (that is the whole AGW debate). Of course we don't know for sure, but there is some evidence that it is true, but the bigger picture may be that things totally out of our control (e.g., volcanos, meteors, solar variation, etc), may in the end drown out our effect, but that doesn't mean the effect isn't there.
**for completeness, we might also consider the distribution of the heat between the surface and the molten core, but to be fair, other than the trivial amount of geothermal energy we use, there's a negligible amount to think about here.
So what makes this the boomers fault rather than bad system design?
One can make many assumptions here:
- boomers helped design the system.
- boomers knew the system was broken and could have fixed it, but didn't.
- boomers should have know the system was broken and fixed it, but were clueless.
- system was designed by some god, and we have no free will and can't change it, and boomers broke the system.
- boomers want to blame broken system on someone else.
Pick one or two of the above. Then we can discuss.
Why do so many proponents of climate change mainstream resort to name calling? I think it's a rhetorical tactic, to appear uncompromising and intimidating. But at the same time, it undermines credibility -- it seems like you have nothing to say and are falling back on tactics.
FTFY. Not that I don't belive in unavoidable climate change that will affect our way of life. I just object in principle to agreeing with people that call other people that don't agree with them uneducated idiots.
Windowless cubicle at Microsoft?
That's too bad. I can't believe they make you run DOS!
Just be happy that they didn't make you run xenix... That command-line version of unix was so "good" that even though SCO bought it, they eventually threw it away ;^) :^p
I see a problem. Although engineers usually have large safety margins, the margin is only relative to the known data at the time. Over 40-60 years, better data points become available which may not have been apparent when the original margin was computed resulting in a much smaller real margin.
The problem: although people can do recomputations for the problem that are obvious to newcomers (a 35yo experienced engineer 60 years later is 95yo consulting engineer long retired or dead), how many built-in assumptions did the original designers make that weren't thought to be critical design issues are now violated by new information? Probably quite a few. How will this likely be addressed? By ignoring this issue because is it too expensive to address.
Your attitude is similar to what was pointed to in the Challenger report, appendix F. To paraphrase: If it is true that if the reliability was so high that it could handle 120 years, it would take an inordinate number of tests to determine it (you would get nothing but a string of perfect results from which no precise figure, other than that the probability is likely more than the number of years so far). But, if the real probability of failure is not so small, similar reactors would show troubles, near failures, and possible actual failures with a reasonable number of trials and standard statistical methods could give a reasonable estimate.
However, sometime people attribute the lack of actual failure as proving the design and "go-with-their-gut" instead of using available statistical methods to do real analysis change the definition of margin to justify their conclusions.
Given the number of reactors is small and we have seen trouble and near failures in some reactors of similar design already (such as the one pointed out by this article), perhaps this estimate is a bit optimistic? Just sayn...
So the Boson makes up the field, or the field makes up the Boson? How can something be made up of itself?
Although it is not technically correct, the way I like to think about it is virtual Bosons make up the field, and the field is from what the Boson is created. In some situations the virtual Bosons can be converted to real Boson which completes the circle... Virtual Bosons seem to be mostly just the accounting trick for balancing in quantized field unit interactions, but with the proper situation, just like monetary accounting tricks, you can convert that back into the real thing ;^)
More importantly....
Did they start making the Tesla Roadster again!?!?!?
I thought they halted the production of the good car in their line to concentrate on 'family cars'....
[rolls eyes]
AFAIK, the original roadster appears to have a couple strikes against it that made continued production problematic. First, since Lotus and Tesla didn't agree to extend the production contract, apparently, Lotus decided to schedule to retool the factory after the intial production run. Second, being a limited production car, they were able to get a temporary exemption from US rules requiring advanced airbags, but that expired at the end of 2011, so they could only sell new production outside the US. Also, it appears that tesla lost money with each roadster sold (too much manual assembly and rework). With these three strikes, it just wasn't worth it to continue with the original roadster.
They still seem to be planning for a new roadster based on a shorten S body... Sadly, an updated roadster does not appear to be scheduled for production before 2014.
You may be a manager, and you might want feedback when people leave, but you aren't the one getting the information, some HR person is getting the feedback during the exit interview.
If you hear any of the feedback (and you usually won't), it will be first filtered through both HR management and your own manager (telephone game style) and recorded for posterity for any of your future performance reviews. Still think you want people to give their feedback to HR in exit interviews? Yeah...
FWIW, a "good" manager from an employee's point of view isn't necessarily the same as a "good" manager from upper management's point of view. Good managers from an employee's point of view don't need to beg their employees for feedback, and if they do get feedback they hopefully are people-oriented enough to read between the lines. If they can't even read their direct reports, they probably have no idea how to read the upper management very well either and that isn't gonna be very good for their direct reports in the long-run (and then they by definition won't be very good managers from the employee's point of view even if upper management loves them). Of course it's possible to be a "good" (or "bad") from both points of view, but from my experience, they generally are independent variables that aren't correlated at all. Just my opinion...
The "v" in the context of W decay to "lv" is a neutrino ("v" is a close approximation to the lowercase N or Nu in greek ν)
Can we put a breeder reactor on Mars?
That would certainly resolve the issue of refueling and would give Martians long term energy security.
And I can't imagine we'd need to worry about nuclear proliferation or dirty bombs on Mars.
Well it is obvious that if we actually can get a standard reactor on mars, we could instead put a breeder reactor, but maybe we really won't want to do this.
I think many people have a misunderstanding about breeder reactors. They are not magic fire-and-forget nearly-perpetual energy machines. The benefit of breeder reactors is that they have extra neutrons available flying around to make nuclear fuel from what is called fertile material (e.g., U238) which it converts to fissile material (e.g., P239) which it can then use as fuel after reprocessing***. Generally, most common breeder reactors need to have the fuel reprocessed (usually a very nasty industrial chemical separation process more complicated that standard U235/U238 separation) to achieve their benefit. The built in assumption of a breeder is that it is cheaper to reprocess than find and mine new uranium to refine. This certainly hasn't turned out to be true on earth (but maybe it might be true on mars, hard to say)...
Also, known breeder reactors are all "fast-neutron" reactors (e.g, they don't slow down the chain-reaction neutrons very much so that they can escape the core to breed a surrounding blanket of fertile fuel). This means they need different coolant system (usually liquid sodium). It is unforutnate that nobody has seemed to come up with a cooling scheme for a breeder that has very good safety properties. With a typical reactor, if you lose water and cooling, like Fukishima, then neutrons don't slow down and at least the chain reaction slows/stops (as on average fast neutrons are then easier absorbed by the bulk of the U238 in the fuel, than the 5% of U235 which would chain so it's essentially sort of breeding instead of chaining when the neutron-slowing water is lost). In current cooling systems for breeders, since it's designed to chain w/ or w/o coolant to slow down the neutrons, you don't get this inherent safety property. This requires extra safeguards to prevent core explosions (as opposed to just core meltdown from the residual heat). Also liquid metal coolants tend to get highly radioactive when exposed to this level of fast neutron flux, so that makes it a very tough material science problem to get high reliability in the cooling system (soduim fires are the biggest problem with breeder reactors on earth).
It seems to me that it would be better to have a more reliable reactor design and spend effort at getting better fuel efficiency for the fuel you have (higher fuel burnup percentage), without relying on a breeder w/ reprocessing for a small colony that didn't want to invest in maintaining complicated industrial processes.
**If you don't consider reprocessing, even standard nuclear reactors "breed" some amount of fuel which is immediatly "burned" (although they are not optimized for that). The most important measure of this is the "burn-up" percentage (an indication how much energy they extract from the fuel you have). Without fancy reprocessing, there isn't too much difference between a breeder reactor and the latest generation of high-burnup standard reactors.
My personal opinion is that this whole exercise isn't much different than asking a person if they thought the price of milk or the price of gas went up more in the last decade (or similar question).
I'd wager that most people wouldn't have any clue because the random person doesn't pay any attention to these things, so they would guess. That guess would likely not depend at all on any variable except their political beliefs.
I'm a bit surprised at the answer concerning the soil on mars and the presumed ease of creating a self sustaining agricultural development.
Plants that we know of need nitrogen in the soil and as far as I understand it, there really isn't a good source of nitrogen on mars (atmosphere 95% CO2, 3% N2 on mars, vs 78% N2 and 20% O2 on earth). On earth we have nitrogen-fixing bacteria, nitrogen-fixing plants (like legumes), and even fossil fuel powered fertilizer to help "fix"-nitrogen into the soil for growing plants, but in each of these cases, the source of nitrogen is from the air. Although decaying plants will release some of their nitrogen back into the soil, this isn't 100%, so energy-efficient recycling won't get you all you need to be sustaining and doesn't address how to get enough Nitrogen there to start with...
This would seem to be a really big impediment to creating a self sustaining agricultural development on mars until this problem is solved.
The war started when the south attacked Fort Sumter. Probably something else would have happened if that hadn't, but the north didn't just invade the south to prevent the seccession.
Fort Sumter was located in South Carolina territory. After South Carolina attempted to seccede, a couple US/union companies instead of retreating, essentially attempted to occupy the 1/2 completed Fort Sumter (which is on an island in charleston harbor in a critical location). The fighting broke out when after a couple of months of nothing happening, the Union army attempted to resupply the fort in South Carolina territory to attempt to keep the fort from the confederate hands.
Certainly something else might have happened to start the war (it seemed inveitable), but you make it sound like the north didn't invade the south to start the war. I'm not sure that statement jives with reality...
The slavery issue was the main reason for the north/south split, not the reason for the war...
The US Civil war was certainly about states rights. The north could have just let the southern states leave the union, but the north was not keen on having a resource rich, wealthy adversary nation right next to it that might align itself with Britian, France, and the native americans against the union. Of course there isn't just one reason for the US civil war, but this was the big deal.
To support this states rights view on the war, you only need to look at contemporaneous events like Emancipation Proclamation. Slaves were only freed in territories that were declared by to be in rebellion. Other slave slates that didn't seceed didn't have their slaves freed (Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri, Tennessee). If the war (not the split) was primarly caused by slavery, wouldn't the slave holding states still in the Union be affected by the slave issue? Nope, the primary goal was to get those rebellious states back into the Union.
we were at the same time giving lots of money to England in their fight against Germany
IIRC lending, not giving. They had to pay it back, and they eventually did.
Better review your history on lend-lease. Basically the US (and Canada) gave stuff to England for token payments (e.g. giving England 50 destroyer in "exchange" for lease payments for new US base locations to be located in former British colonies). Then after the war was over, the US depreciated the value of the lend-lease items by 90% (because now they were "used") and allowed England to "buy" them at the depreciated value with a 2% loan stretched out over 50 years.
Eventually, the residual of lend-lease was "paid" back on these terms on Dec 2006. Of course England could have paid it back earlier, but a 2% loan was a good deal and they of course paid it back in 50 year inflated money value...
If that kind of loan would have been made to members of congress, I think many people would have called it a gift... (e.g., lend them a $1M house, depreciate it 90% in 4 years, give them the opportunity to buy it for $100K with a 2% 50 year loan) What would you call it?
I'm not saying we shouldn't have done it, just calling a spade a spade. That whole lend-lease fiction was just to do an end-around the isolationist republican congress. It wasn't reality...
[W]e weren't broke during WWII and the Civil War was not about slavery.
Actually we were pretty broke during WWII. Remember WWII was right after the great depression and many think it was the event that allowed us to pull out of the depression. The US treasury debt was ~$40B in 1941, and $250B in 1946 when the war ended. The US financed WWII with lots of warbonds...
FWIW, I don't think any historians would agree that we fought WWII to protect the rights of any people (other than US self interest). The US entered WWII to stop Japan from gaining too much influence in the Pacific (of course we were at the same time giving lots of money to England in their fight against Germany, but that wasn't really to protect their rights either). History records that it all came to head when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. The fact that Germany wanted to pick a direct fight with the US pretty much gave us no choice but to go over to Europe for real too...
And of course the Civil war wasn't about slavery, but states rights. Is it okay to secede from the union when you don't get your way? Apparently, no say the winners.
Since the government can't stop the violence, the Coalition and Alliance were granted police powers by the government.
At some point, they will have no need for the government.
So which cadre is Google? the Coalition, or the Alliance? Does it matter? ;^)
Drugs aren't the reason hospitals are so expensive. Hospitals mostly just pass on the cost of drugs to their patients (via their insurance companies). If two drugs cost $10 and $100, and the hospital wanted to charge you $100 to put a pill in a cup, you would likely be billed $110 and $200, respectively. The reason hospitals are so expensive ($100 to put a pill in a cup is not unheard of) is that they spend money on stuff (like medical equipment) that is overpriced and then need to bill it out. Hospitals also have to cover for uninsured treatment losses (mostly ER related).
As to why drugs are so expensive, well the main reason for that is that we've collectively decided to pay them in the US. Some other countries have decided otherwise.
Why have we decided to pay the high price for pills in the US? Well, it's of course complicated, but often it boils down to the fact that it is sometimes strangely cheaper to give someone a standard overpriced pill than have a high-priced doctor supervise a custom course of treatment. Thus insurance companies would rather pay a standardize price for a pill (that they can knock down the price, don't be fooled that they pay that price), than try to figure out how to cost out a non-standard treatment by a doctor.
Don't fool yourself, if some actuary in an insurance company thought it would be cheaper to pay for a custom doctor supervised treatment than to pay an over-inflated price for a pill, they would do it in a heartbeat. Thus, there is no incentive for the magic pill makers to drop their prices below the cost of equivalent doctor supervised treatment with using cheaper pills.
Let's be clear, I'm not saying that doctors and hospital and drug-companies aren't skimming off huge of profits, but most of the profit is a result of our desire to have the latest and greatest cool stuff (not unlike Apple). Those one-off stories about some patient not being able to afford some cancer therapy drug tug at the heartstrings, but in reality affects a very small part of their bottom line (many times, the drug companies just end up donating those drugs to kill the bad publicity). A drug like Lipitor, Humira, Nexium, and Viagra are the USD$1B drugs they are really concerned about and those are the ones that feed into the human desire for the latest and greatest and they are just charging what the market will bear...
The real question (in my mind) is how to stop the consolidation of the drug companies into multi-national monopolies (reducing competition) and generating entities that are too-big-to-fail (can't sue them out of existance, who will make the drugs)? That's is a general problem that has less to do with drug companies in specific, but all companies in general.