Speaking as a layman, I don't think this discovery validates the Higgs mechanism yet.
That duck waddling in through the fog already looks enough like a duck to satisfy me.
That duck is not waddling in a fog, it's smashed against the grille of a semi-truck...** For all we know it is a small goose or a large swallow (maybe american, the european too smaller and the african are too thin)...
**I was going to say sucked through a jet engine, but people seem to like car analogies around here...
It validates the Higgs mechanism, which explains why elementary particles have mass. Now the Higgs boson is no longer considered hypothetical, likewise the Higgs mechanism and the Higgs field, mediated by the Higgs bosun. Speaking as a layman.
Speaking as a layman, I don't think this discovery validates the Higgs mechanism yet. All they have done is found what looks like a particle at 125 GeV/c2 (about the same as 130 protons). They don't know what it does yet. Yes it looks like a duck, but it hasn't quacked yet...
About the closest analogy that I can come up with is that they smashed billions of cars into each other and listened to the result. They know how heavy all other known cars are, and they are looking to see if there's a rare Tesla Model S in there but they don't know how heavy it is because they've never seen it before, but they have some rough idea it's between 115 and 130 units. They make the assumption that a car crash would make a certain characteristic crash-sound based on how heavy it was. Of course there is a whole continnuum of sound because no crashes are the same and after the cars crash, they might break into other parts, but they kinda know how heavy the major parts of disintegrating cars are and what sound they might make as well. After listening to all theses crashes and doing lots of math they conclude that they have found that it is highly likely some car around 125 units heavy was part of those billions of smashed cars and no other car they know of is that heavy.
From that they conclude they have found the Tesla Model S and it is 125 units heavy. Now that the Tesla Model S is no longer considered hypothetical, likewize the assertion that it goes 0-60 in 4.4 seconds and 300miles on a full charge must also be true (whoops, better not make those assumption until someone takes an unsmashed one for a test drive, right?)
That depends. Are we talking about the inertial mass, or the gravitational mass? They may be numerically equal, but that doesn't mean they are the same thing.
They are the same thing. If they weren't, general relativity wouldn't work.
Although I hate to take sides in these types of theoretical musings, just because we think it's the same today, doesn't mean it's really the same. Many people already suspect that generally relativity is an approximation (like the newtonian approximation before it) and that when you get to the planck scale something else is likely gonna happen. Consider that people once thought that by applying a constant force, you could accelerate arbitrarily "fast", but the universe didn't turn out to work that way.
If it turns out that a mass's resistance to acceleration is a scalar field effect (one of the possible Higgs-boson mass models), it seems to me that gravity got a whole lot more complicated since it has to interact with particles the same relative way to yield exactly the same equivalent mass.
So if I took bananas out of a crate and put them into a bag for retail sale in the US and the bag and the label was made in the US, would you be okay with a Made in the USA label on the bag?
For the record, there are a few chips inside that are likely to have been made in the US, although they could have chosen some of the other high value chips to be so as well, but apparently didn't. They used an Elpida*** (fabs in japan/taiwan) DDR2 dram which might have been substituted with a Micron (fabs in Idaho) mobile dram. They used a Samsung Flash which is made in Korea (Samsung's Fab in TX is for Apple production, and I think Intel/Micron also makes a comparable flash manufactured in utah), and they OMAP processor was manufactured by TSMC in Taiwan, but they could have had the chips made in WaferTech (a TSMC compatible fab in Camus, WA)... But they didn't... Why? Probably because these options weren't available at a reasonable price.
The article is from someone who will go to pedantic lengths to justify their hate.
Maybe true, or maybe not, but that doesn't invalidate this question.
***recently Micron bought the bankrupt shell of japanese Elpida...
...a Fortune 500 company with very little respect for their IT department......the whole thing melted down in under 2 years and resulted in the department being gutted and replaced almost entirely with H-1B workers.
I think you have your answer right there. They probably got the result they were looking for and it took less than 2 years...
...If Jobs was in charge, I don't think the Vista Ready/Compatible disaster would have happened. The crux of it was a lower level exec made a decision to reverse course on key hardware requirements that left many consumers with PCs that were not really fully Vista capable but it wasn't clear to consumers what that meant. Ballmer just let it happen instead of stepping on someone's toes.
I'm not sure this is the best example. It seems to me (anyhow) that this "someones" toes were Intel. Basically Intel wanted PC sold w/ integrated graphics to be Vista Ready. Microsoft caved. I doubt this call was made at some low-level exec, but even if it were, I'm sure that Intel would have pull out all the stops to make this happen, maybe including throwing chairs at whoever happened to be the CEO...
Maybe Jobs would have said no, but I'm sure the consequences would be that Vista would have had to be delayed yet another year... (I've heard that OEMs pretty much threatened to boycott Vista and ship XP another year if microsoft obsoleted the computers they had in the pipeline)...
But there shouldn't be a 405 in Oregon. It is preferred to avoid having three digit highways that are not congruous in adjacent states. I'm guessing they had no choice, but with a 405 in both WA and CA, OR should have to change theirs.
I have no idea where you get your info. In addition to the 405CA, 405OR, 405WA, there are a plethora of other similar ones. You can see a list here...
(There is also an incredibly bizarre, although not unheard of, set of circumstances where the 405 in two adjoining states might be the same highway to the federal government, despite the highways themselves not being physically connected. Wish I could remember the examples of that.)
There are many examples of 3-digit inter-state highways going between several states and as mentioned above, they are not connected, but not the 405 in our universe anyhow... Maybe that happened in the Fringe alternate-universe...
The lifespan of atmospheric CO2 is about a century or so.
Unfortunatly, life is a bit more compllicated than that. The actual time a particular emitted CO2 molecule stays in the atmosphere before re-interacting with the biosphere has been estimated to be closer to 5 years. However, the total time before eventual recapture or dissipation of net CO2 output has been estimated to be closer to 50-100 years. Why the difference? It's because one of the largest sinks (the ocean) although it probably can sink all of the anthropogenic CO2 produced so far (and likely to be produced), it unfortunatly operates on a much longer timescale (it absorbs the CO2 and re-emits some fraction of it because the surface is saturated so it has to mix*** to absorb more). How much does is re-emit? We don't know, because we don't know the full process yet (it involves both deep sea currents and mineral-carbonate rock formation/uptake).
So when you read the lifespan of atmospheric CO2 is a century, that's not true, but the effect of the emission of a marginal amount of CO2 will have an continuing effect over a century might be true if our currently models about the ocean CO2 uptake and re-emission hold up.
***maybe if we turned the ocean into a giant jacuzzi it would help this;^P
Removing the CO2 is damn near impractical. However, even if we did it, it wouldn't be enough.
Any warming (should it exist) eventually is likely to cause two other effects... 1. an increase in the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere (which is currently responsible for about 50% of the greenhouse effect compared to 20% for CO2). 2. an increase in methane clathrate melting in the permafrost and ocean releasing large quantities of methane into our atmosphere. Methane is ~70x a potent a greenhouse gas as CO2 (but currently only accounts for about 7% of greenhouse effect)
Many speculate that if warming actually happens, these two effects could effectively cause run-away global warming. That's why people are thinking about how to block the heating from the sun (e.g., spraying particles in the air), not just sequestering carbon or just living with the consequences of warming. It's probably too late to just think about CO2. That ship has probably sailed...
Or maybe you should STFU as the 405 is a highway in CA. It turns out to be legal to split lanes in CA.
Damn CA-ians center-of-the-universe**...;^) In case you didn't know, There's a 405 in Oregon (stadium freeway), and a 405 in Washington (east-side lake washington). Although there were efforts in both state to allow lane-splitting, lane-splitting remains against the law in both states...
FYI, you might have easily predicted the existance of 405's in other states if you knew the interstate highway numbering convention "XYY" (where X is odd for spur routes and X is even for bypass/loop routes and YY is the nearest interstate in this case Interstate 5 which goes through CA, OR, WA)
**yes, I currently live in the center of the universe, but I do visit the back-country from time-to-time;^P
Woz: never the CEO of apple Jobs: not the first (Michael Scott), nor second (Mike Markkula), nor third (John Sculley), nor fourth (Michael Spindler), nor fifth (Gil Amelio) CEO of apple. Not 'till he was fired from Apple did he become the CEO of NeXT...
Perhaps you could conclude from this that getting fired and starting your own company is the model for aspiring Tech Execs?
If enough people care about privacy, maybe there's a market for the development of an energy buffer (aka True AC battery). Today, this is inefficient as "AC batteries" are just DC batteries (and you get major losses converting to DC, storing it, and then converting it back to AC). Although you could potentially use something as primitive as a flywheel for AC energy storage, there are some chemical reactions that are inherently non-linear chemical reactions (e.g., Belousov–Zhabotinsky reaction) that might be developed into AC batteries for energy storage.
If you had such an AC battery buffer, you'd just draw from the grid to charge the battery (presumably when the marginal price was low), and then use it when you needed it. The power company wouldn't be any wiser and in fact would probably thank you (as it will help them balance out peak load).
Although this is very futuristic, if you are paranoid today, you probably can approximate it somewhat by installing solar panels in your house. Instead of "selling" the power back to the grid (which the power company can interpret as you not using it), you could pseudorandomly sink the power to mask your energy usage back to the power company... So the reduction in sell back recovery would be the cost of privacy...
I'm not so sure that fraud is more or less prevalant among academic scientists than commercial scientist. As you alluded to, peer review is not designed to catch fraud. If a researcher published in an obscure backwater field that no-one would likely try to replicate, a researcher could go on for a long while w/o being caught or even being considered incompetent. The same is true for a commercial scientist (witness the cosmetic and nutritional suppliment industries).
On the other hand, scientist in "hot" fields will have hoards of researcher in that field and if you do research in an uninteresting niche in that field, you might also escape detection for a while (or not, as bayer and pfizer have recently leaked out, most research that they have internally attempted to replicate to try to find new avenues for drugs had non-replicable results).
People are people no matter in academia or industry...
Education is never a scam, you should always continue learning.
Sadly, that's a common fallacy. Although you should always continue learning, sometimes so-called "education" opportunities are scams. Witness the plethora of diploma mills out there that cater to mid-career angst... Also, there are quite a few that border on scams as in many fields continuing degrees don't seem to help much, yet they are offered anyhow...
It depends on where you're living / working. In Chicago, experience was all that mattered. When I moved to the Bay Area, I've had interviews stop when they found out I didn't have a degree.
I've seen many hiring managers that were school snobs and/or degree snobs (both in the bay area and outside). Although on principle I'd like to condemn the school/degree snobbery practice, unfortunatly, I've also seen areas where letters after your name were useful to the company (independent of the actual job performed by the employee). If your company is dealing with lots of foreign companies (especially asian companies, although some european companies as well) and your job is customer facing, or if you are a small company dealing with certain Venture Capital fundraising activities, having employees with petigree sometimes is the trump card.
Of course this slim slice of jobs doesn't justify the school/degree snobbery that exists (which is pretty rampant and unrelated), it's probably mostly a function of people wanting to hire people that are like themselves. This has been the way that job discrimination has been justified in the past (e.g., against women, minorities, etc ), and probably will, unfortunatly, continue to be tolerated in the future...
On the other hand, there was a study that seemed to correlate the schools where a student applied (rather than actually ended up attending) was a strong indicator of future success. Sometimes you just have to get that union card and join the club or at least have the motivation to try. Then again, I've also worked with a few people that never attended college, yet were all pretty good programmers and/or technology folks. Although most you wouldn't know it, there was one guy who had lots of experience, but always seemed to have a chip on his shoulder (probably just overcompensating). He was definitely not very pleasant to work with (IMHO, not very different than other folks that I've worked with that had phds and never let you forget it). YMMV...
Unless this thing rides nuclear explosions, it should have its own name.
Technically, Orion (the nuke one) was a DARPA (military research) project and this Orion (SLS-MPCV) is a NASA (civilian) project. NASA isn't totally off the hook, though, the original Orion was the Constallation CEV, but this one is really mostly the same thing (and CEV never launched and is dead). I've heard whispers they revivified the name in part present the illusion that everyone was working on the same program all along and possibly to take advantage of a loophole to allow the MPCV to use any earmark funding from the old CEV program.
On the other hand, Microsoft has a similar excuse about Surface: the original Surface was Microsoft Research and the current Surface is a proposed Microsoft product. That's not nearly as good as an excuse, though as they are totally different (like DARPA/NASA Orion), and they are the same company (although perhaps MSFT research may beg to differ with that)...
Secondly the Higgs causes the fundamental particles to have mass e..g electron, quarks, W/Z bosons etc. The vast majority of your mass comes from the protons and neutrons in the atomic nuclei which make up your body. This mass is almost entirely to do with the binding energy between the quarks and almost nothing to do with the Higgs. In fact, while the quark masses are hard to measure, the best estimate is that less than 0.1% of a proton or neutron mass comes from the quark masses i.e. from the Higgs.
AFAIK, it's quite a bit more subtle than what you are saying. There is the "E=mc^2" type of mass and the resistance to acceleration "F=ma" mass. To say that the vast majority of mass comes from the binding energy between quarks and little comes from the Higgs mass of the quarks is not understanding what a Higgs field might look like. If you believe in equivalence, all forms of mass are equivalent. This would imply that the binding energy between quarks must interact with the higgs field to resist acceleration as well the "quark masses" (whatever the hell that means, I assume that means rest mass of a quark).
Re:Maybe because it compiles down to the metal...
on
What's To Love About C?
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· Score: 4, Informative
...and not some VM? Most of the popular languages these days are all dynamic. And they are very convenient and nice. But if you actually want to know what the machine is actually doing, and want to have a say in such things, C is the way to go.
I mean, unless you want to, you know, use pascal or fortran or something.
Although "C" compiles down really very close to the metal, so does "C++" (and a host of other more modern languages). However, it's not that easy to take that next step to the metal. In between is a machine that virtualizes the registers (using register renaming techinques), virtualizes the memory (using difficult to predict caching, translation, and ordering operations), and reorders the instructions (speculation, branch target hiding, etc), and runs in a sandbox (under the os which is timeslicing between tasks and faulting and swapping in memory translations and maybe even simulating some instructions).
Knowing what the machine is actually doing is often a mythical quest down the rabbit hole. Although I'm a big fan of "C+" (what I call the c++ subset that doesn't have all the crapola that I don't use**), I'm under no illusion that all you are really doing with C is using a more predictable translation strategy (e.g., static compile time translation) rather than some magical "metal" commanding language.
IANAL, but the structure of many multi-national corporations are weird and complicated. The easiest way I've found to think about it is to treat multi-nationals as a big family with a super-patriarch/matriarch instead of thinking of a multi-national as a single person.
For example, generally, in each country a multi-national generally sets up it's own division of the company which is chartered to do business in that location, which is usually structured as a mostly owned subsidiary of the parent company. The reason to do this is to satisfy the laws of that host country w/o imposing them on the parent company (e.g., ownership requirements, employment requirements, tax requirements, etc).
Of course once you set up a bunch of these companies in different juristictions, now you can play all sorts of games. The biggest game that is played is the income tax shell game (moving income into companies that have the lowest tax rate). The other big game is to hid parent company liability for big disasters and legal lawsuits (parent company was just an investor in the local company).
In China, they often require a certain percentage of chinese ownership or key employees for certain types of companies, and it's likely that this is why taiwanese Proview set up this china subsidiary in the first place. It's not inconcievable that the trademark on iPad needed to be registered in china and they chose to have the local company do that registration instead of the parent company in taiwan for legal reasons (they might not recognize the taiwan trademark law in china). Of course, it retrospect, that seemed like a brilliant decision, but I'm guessing they just did it by accident.
Okay, I'll bite (I assume you know how to google, so this is probably just bait)...
1. The PPACA was structured as an insurance mandate instead of single payer was that it is politically unpopular in the US to nationalize industries (even the health insurance industry). People in the US seem to want choice. In the US generally the government isn't expected to force people to BUY something (AFAIK, nowhere in the US you have to go to drivers school to get a drivers licence). On the otherhand, there is Medicare (essentially a "forced" premium single-payer for elderly folks), but even then there are Medicare Supplimental policies that can be purchased from private parties for people to get their "choices".
2. HMO (health maintenance organization) a corporation that is chartered with a special legal carveout. The primary feature of the HMO corporation that is allowed to sell insurance and provide services for patients. The reason that an HMO isn't just a normal insurance corporation is that they have an inherent conflict of interest between the premium collection side and the patient's best interests (given the doctor is employed by the same company), which needs some legal exemptions (in exchange for more regulation). In this context, think about an HMO being analogous to a local version of a nationalized health service (the same entity collects the taxes and provides the services), except that being private, it can't force people to join.
3. I don't think USAns think that corporations are somehow more moral (or have their best interests at heart) than the government, just that they are probably very similar, so that's a false choice you are presenting. However, there's a vague idea that it's easier to find a new corporation to do business if you don't like them with than to find a new government (w/o moving to another country) and that's often why private options seem more compelling than government options (although in reality, they are mostly similar in the long run).
Chief Justice Roberts: “It Is Not Our Job to Protect the People From the Consequences of Their Political Choices”
There you go... bring on the consequences!
So who's job is it to look out for the best interests of the country? Is that one of those mystery jobs that Americans just don't want to do?
Yep. It is the American voter's job to look out for the best interests of the country. So apparently it is one of those mystery jobs that Americans just don't want to do. Since Mr. Robert's and the rest of SCOTUS is appointed, he is quite correct, it is not his job to protect people from the consequences of their political choices...
Because a lot of younger, healthier people are now going to be buying in, costs may actually come DOWN.
Unfortunatly, since many low-cost insurance options that younger, healthier people have been buying have been eliminated (don't meet new minimum coverage requirements, deductibles are too high), it is likely to be a wash...
Ultimately, the only answer is a single-payer system. As long as you have private companies in the insurance business, there is a perverse incentive to screw their customers over.
Sadly, as long as you have private companies, there are generally some choices. With the government single payer system, there will likely not be much choice. E.g., like social security you get "billed" 12.4%, you can't choose a lower amount for lower benefits if you dont' think you need them.
People whine and complain about government's incompetence, and I'd never say there's no waste or that government is perfect. However, I trust government a hell of a lot more than I trust the insurance industry, which has proven time and again that they're scum.
Actually I think both are quite scummy, but with the incentives in place today it is more likely that insurance companies will pay nice (now there are minimum loss ratios, although unforunatly, they are only 85%). Given the NHS in other countries, I'm not so sure that the government would have any incentive to maintain a loss ratio less than 200% (meaning they'd divert general revenue to pay for healthcare) which seems unsustainable to me...
When I hear stuff like this I just shake my head. Sadly, the CBO has estimated that this will likely be a highly regressive tax. Sure, the "poor" are exempt from this tax/penalty, but as I mentioned in a previous post, the low-income folks that work for small employers get hit the hardest by this tax/penalty.
Either they can't responisbly afford the minimally compliant insurance to avoid the tax and just end up paying the tax (which is scaled down to be proportional to income so they can afford the tax), or their employer will have decided it's cheaper for them to pay the penalty and stop offering minimally compliant insurance to their employees which puts them into this boat as well. The CBO estimates about 4Million people will fall into this category.
Sure the tax will his some dumb and irresponsible people as well, but sadly as drafted, it will also make that step from welfare to self-dependence, that much higher... On balance, I think it's okay, but lets not call these 4M folks dumb/irresponsible. Sometimes people have to make responsible choices for their family between paying for safe food/shelter and paying some dumb tax. I hope to never be "dumb" enough to be in that situation.
Bullshit. The tax is only on those who refuse to get insurance. That will be an infinitisimally small number of Americans.
The current CBO estimates are that 4 Million people will likely choose to pay the IRS rather than purchase insurance. The rationale for this is that the penalty/tax for not being insured is dependent on income. For low-income folks who work for an employer that does not provide health insurance***, it may be significantly cheaper to just pay the penalty/tax than to purchase the minimially qualifying insurance to be exempted from being penalized.
4M/400M is about 1% which is small, but not "infinitisimally" small (depending on how you define the word) considering that there is currently estimated to be 30M uninsured today, and only 25M uninsured when all the provisions of the new healthcare act have been deployed which only has a 5M gap (including 400K 19-25yro folks eligible for the new under26child provision). Under this definition, only an "infinitisimally" small number of Americans will gain insurance under this act. Depending on your politics, you may like this definition of "infinitisimal"...
In any case, I personally think it is generally a good thing for people to have health insurance, but unfortuantly as designed it greatly increases the "step" between being state dependent (e.g., on welfare, etc), and being self supporting (e.g, either you or your employer purchasing your health insurance for you). I think that was on purpose for 2 reasons: it's expensive to close this gap, and the authors want to create a vaccuum where nationalized health care can grow. Witness the proposed expansion of medicare to support families with children (forcing states to accept this expansion was ruled unconsitutional in this same SCOTUS ruling).
*** in addition to the small business exclusion, because of the new definition of minimally qualifying insurance, it is estimated that some employers will find it cheaper to join the current crop of non-insurers and pay the fine rather than to increase their coverage to the minimial qualifying amount. This increase in coverage cost is primarly due to several provisions of the act such as the removal of the annual and lifetime limits...
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.space.com/16412-dark-matter-filament-galaxy-clusters.html
Speaking as a layman, I don't think this discovery validates the Higgs mechanism yet.
That duck waddling in through the fog already looks enough like a duck to satisfy me.
That duck is not waddling in a fog, it's smashed against the grille of a semi-truck...**
For all we know it is a small goose or a large swallow (maybe american, the european too smaller and the african are too thin)...
**I was going to say sucked through a jet engine, but people seem to like car analogies around here...
It validates the Higgs mechanism, which explains why elementary particles have mass. Now the Higgs boson is no longer considered hypothetical, likewise the Higgs mechanism and the Higgs field, mediated by the Higgs bosun. Speaking as a layman.
Speaking as a layman, I don't think this discovery validates the Higgs mechanism yet. All they have done is found what looks like a particle at 125 GeV/c2 (about the same as 130 protons). They don't know what it does yet. Yes it looks like a duck, but it hasn't quacked yet...
About the closest analogy that I can come up with is that they smashed billions of cars into each other and listened to the result. They know how heavy all other known cars are, and they are looking to see if there's a rare Tesla Model S in there but they don't know how heavy it is because they've never seen it before, but they have some rough idea it's between 115 and 130 units. They make the assumption that a car crash would make a certain characteristic crash-sound based on how heavy it was. Of course there is a whole continnuum of sound because no crashes are the same and after the cars crash, they might break into other parts, but they kinda know how heavy the major parts of disintegrating cars are and what sound they might make as well. After listening to all theses crashes and doing lots of math they conclude that they have found that it is highly likely some car around 125 units heavy was part of those billions of smashed cars and no other car they know of is that heavy.
From that they conclude they have found the Tesla Model S and it is 125 units heavy. Now that the Tesla Model S is no longer considered hypothetical, likewize the assertion that it goes 0-60 in 4.4 seconds and 300miles on a full charge must also be true (whoops, better not make those assumption until someone takes an unsmashed one for a test drive, right?)
That depends. Are we talking about the inertial mass, or the gravitational mass? They may be numerically equal, but that doesn't mean they are the same thing.
They are the same thing. If they weren't, general relativity wouldn't work.
Although I hate to take sides in these types of theoretical musings, just because we think it's the same today, doesn't mean it's really the same. Many people already suspect that generally relativity is an approximation (like the newtonian approximation before it) and that when you get to the planck scale something else is likely gonna happen. Consider that people once thought that by applying a constant force, you could accelerate arbitrarily "fast", but the universe didn't turn out to work that way.
If it turns out that a mass's resistance to acceleration is a scalar field effect (one of the possible Higgs-boson mass models), it seems to me that gravity got a whole lot more complicated since it has to interact with particles the same relative way to yield exactly the same equivalent mass.
The housing and assembly is done in the US.
So if I took bananas out of a crate and put them into a bag for retail sale in the US and the bag and the label was made in the US, would you be okay with a Made in the USA label on the bag?
For the record, there are a few chips inside that are likely to have been made in the US, although they could have chosen some of the other high value chips to be so as well, but apparently didn't. They used an Elpida*** (fabs in japan/taiwan) DDR2 dram which might have been substituted with a Micron (fabs in Idaho) mobile dram. They used a Samsung Flash which is made in Korea (Samsung's Fab in TX is for Apple production, and I think Intel/Micron also makes a comparable flash manufactured in utah), and they OMAP processor was manufactured by TSMC in Taiwan, but they could have had the chips made in WaferTech (a TSMC compatible fab in Camus, WA)... But they didn't... Why? Probably because these options weren't available at a reasonable price.
The article is from someone who will go to pedantic lengths to justify their hate.
Maybe true, or maybe not, but that doesn't invalidate this question.
***recently Micron bought the bankrupt shell of japanese Elpida...
...a Fortune 500 company with very little respect for their IT department......the whole thing melted down in under 2 years and resulted in the department being gutted and replaced almost entirely with H-1B workers.
I think you have your answer right there. They probably got the result they were looking for and it took less than 2 years...
...If Jobs was in charge, I don't think the Vista Ready/Compatible disaster would have happened. The crux of it was a lower level exec made a decision to reverse course on key hardware requirements that left many consumers with PCs that were not really fully Vista capable but it wasn't clear to consumers what that meant. Ballmer just let it happen instead of stepping on someone's toes.
I'm not sure this is the best example. It seems to me (anyhow) that this "someones" toes were Intel. Basically Intel wanted PC sold w/ integrated graphics to be Vista Ready. Microsoft caved. I doubt this call was made at some low-level exec, but even if it were, I'm sure that Intel would have pull out all the stops to make this happen, maybe including throwing chairs at whoever happened to be the CEO...
Maybe Jobs would have said no, but I'm sure the consequences would be that Vista would have had to be delayed yet another year... (I've heard that OEMs pretty much threatened to boycott Vista and ship XP another year if microsoft obsoleted the computers they had in the pipeline)...
But there shouldn't be a 405 in Oregon. It is preferred to avoid having three digit highways that are not congruous in adjacent states. I'm guessing they had no choice, but with a 405 in both WA and CA, OR should have to change theirs.
I have no idea where you get your info. In addition to the 405CA, 405OR, 405WA, there are a plethora of other similar ones. You can see a list here...
(There is also an incredibly bizarre, although not unheard of, set of circumstances where the 405 in two adjoining states might be the same highway to the federal government, despite the highways themselves not being physically connected. Wish I could remember the examples of that.)
There are many examples of 3-digit inter -state highways going between several states and as mentioned above, they are not connected, but not the 405 in our universe anyhow... Maybe that happened in the Fringe alternate-universe...
The lifespan of atmospheric CO2 is about a century or so.
Unfortunatly, life is a bit more compllicated than that. The actual time a particular emitted CO2 molecule stays in the atmosphere before re-interacting with the biosphere has been estimated to be closer to 5 years. However, the total time before eventual recapture or dissipation of net CO2 output has been estimated to be closer to 50-100 years. Why the difference? It's because one of the largest sinks (the ocean) although it probably can sink all of the anthropogenic CO2 produced so far (and likely to be produced), it unfortunatly operates on a much longer timescale (it absorbs the CO2 and re-emits some fraction of it because the surface is saturated so it has to mix*** to absorb more). How much does is re-emit? We don't know, because we don't know the full process yet (it involves both deep sea currents and mineral-carbonate rock formation/uptake).
So when you read the lifespan of atmospheric CO2 is a century, that's not true, but the effect of the emission of a marginal amount of CO2 will have an continuing effect over a century might be true if our currently models about the ocean CO2 uptake and re-emission hold up.
***maybe if we turned the ocean into a giant jacuzzi it would help this ;^P
Removing the CO2 is damn near impractical. However, even if we did it, it wouldn't be enough.
Any warming (should it exist) eventually is likely to cause two other effects...
1. an increase in the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere (which is currently responsible for about 50% of the greenhouse effect compared to 20% for CO2).
2. an increase in methane clathrate melting in the permafrost and ocean releasing large quantities of methane into our atmosphere. Methane is ~70x a potent a greenhouse gas as CO2 (but currently only accounts for about 7% of greenhouse effect)
Many speculate that if warming actually happens, these two effects could effectively cause run-away global warming. That's why people are thinking about how to block the heating from the sun (e.g., spraying particles in the air), not just sequestering carbon or just living with the consequences of warming. It's probably too late to just think about CO2. That ship has probably sailed...
Or maybe you should STFU as the 405 is a highway in CA. It turns out to be legal to split lanes in CA.
Damn CA-ians center-of-the-universe**... ;^)
In case you didn't know, There's a 405 in Oregon (stadium freeway), and a 405 in Washington (east-side lake washington).
Although there were efforts in both state to allow lane-splitting, lane-splitting remains against the law in both states...
FYI, you might have easily predicted the existance of 405's in other states if you knew the interstate highway numbering convention "XYY" (where X is odd for spur routes and X is even for bypass/loop routes and YY is the nearest interstate in this case Interstate 5 which goes through CA, OR, WA)
**yes, I currently live in the center of the universe, but I do visit the back-country from time-to-time ;^P
Woz: never the CEO of apple
Jobs: not the first (Michael Scott), nor second (Mike Markkula), nor third (John Sculley), nor fourth (Michael Spindler), nor fifth (Gil Amelio) CEO of apple. Not 'till he was fired from Apple did he become the CEO of NeXT...
Perhaps you could conclude from this that getting fired and starting your own company is the model for aspiring Tech Execs?
If enough people care about privacy, maybe there's a market for the development of an energy buffer (aka True AC battery). Today, this is inefficient as "AC batteries" are just DC batteries (and you get major losses converting to DC, storing it, and then converting it back to AC). Although you could potentially use something as primitive as a flywheel for AC energy storage, there are some chemical reactions that are inherently non-linear chemical reactions (e.g., Belousov–Zhabotinsky reaction) that might be developed into AC batteries for energy storage.
If you had such an AC battery buffer, you'd just draw from the grid to charge the battery (presumably when the marginal price was low), and then use it when you needed it. The power company wouldn't be any wiser and in fact would probably thank you (as it will help them balance out peak load).
Although this is very futuristic, if you are paranoid today, you probably can approximate it somewhat by installing solar panels in your house. Instead of "selling" the power back to the grid (which the power company can interpret as you not using it), you could pseudorandomly sink the power to mask your energy usage back to the power company... So the reduction in sell back recovery would be the cost of privacy...
I'm not so sure that fraud is more or less prevalant among academic scientists than commercial scientist. As you alluded to, peer review is not designed to catch fraud. If a researcher published in an obscure backwater field that no-one would likely try to replicate, a researcher could go on for a long while w/o being caught or even being considered incompetent. The same is true for a commercial scientist (witness the cosmetic and nutritional suppliment industries).
On the other hand, scientist in "hot" fields will have hoards of researcher in that field and if you do research in an uninteresting niche in that field, you might also escape detection for a while (or not, as bayer and pfizer have recently leaked out, most research that they have internally attempted to replicate to try to find new avenues for drugs had non-replicable results).
People are people no matter in academia or industry...
Education is never a scam, you should always continue learning.
Sadly, that's a common fallacy. Although you should always continue learning, sometimes so-called "education" opportunities are scams. Witness the plethora of diploma mills out there that cater to mid-career angst... Also, there are quite a few that border on scams as in many fields continuing degrees don't seem to help much, yet they are offered anyhow...
It depends on where you're living / working. In Chicago, experience was all that mattered. When I moved to the Bay Area, I've had interviews stop when they found out I didn't have a degree.
I've seen many hiring managers that were school snobs and/or degree snobs (both in the bay area and outside). Although on principle I'd like to condemn the school/degree snobbery practice, unfortunatly, I've also seen areas where letters after your name were useful to the company (independent of the actual job performed by the employee). If your company is dealing with lots of foreign companies (especially asian companies, although some european companies as well) and your job is customer facing, or if you are a small company dealing with certain Venture Capital fundraising activities, having employees with petigree sometimes is the trump card.
Of course this slim slice of jobs doesn't justify the school/degree snobbery that exists (which is pretty rampant and unrelated), it's probably mostly a function of people wanting to hire people that are like themselves. This has been the way that job discrimination has been justified in the past (e.g., against women, minorities, etc ), and probably will, unfortunatly, continue to be tolerated in the future...
On the other hand, there was a study that seemed to correlate the schools where a student applied (rather than actually ended up attending) was a strong indicator of future success. Sometimes you just have to get that union card and join the club or at least have the motivation to try. Then again, I've also worked with a few people that never attended college, yet were all pretty good programmers and/or technology folks. Although most you wouldn't know it, there was one guy who had lots of experience, but always seemed to have a chip on his shoulder (probably just overcompensating). He was definitely not very pleasant to work with (IMHO, not very different than other folks that I've worked with that had phds and never let you forget it). YMMV...
I'm looking at you, Microsoft and NASA.
Unless this thing rides nuclear explosions, it should have its own name.
Technically, Orion (the nuke one) was a DARPA (military research) project and this Orion (SLS-MPCV) is a NASA (civilian) project. NASA isn't totally off the hook, though, the original Orion was the Constallation CEV, but this one is really mostly the same thing (and CEV never launched and is dead). I've heard whispers they revivified the name in part present the illusion that everyone was working on the same program all along and possibly to take advantage of a loophole to allow the MPCV to use any earmark funding from the old CEV program.
On the other hand, Microsoft has a similar excuse about Surface: the original Surface was Microsoft Research and the current Surface is a proposed Microsoft product. That's not nearly as good as an excuse, though as they are totally different (like DARPA/NASA Orion), and they are the same company (although perhaps MSFT research may beg to differ with that)...
Secondly the Higgs causes the fundamental particles to have mass e..g electron, quarks, W/Z bosons etc. The vast majority of your mass comes from the protons and neutrons in the atomic nuclei which make up your body. This mass is almost entirely to do with the binding energy between the quarks and almost nothing to do with the Higgs. In fact, while the quark masses are hard to measure, the best estimate is that less than 0.1% of a proton or neutron mass comes from the quark masses i.e. from the Higgs.
AFAIK, it's quite a bit more subtle than what you are saying. There is the "E=mc^2" type of mass and the resistance to acceleration "F=ma" mass. To say that the vast majority of mass comes from the binding energy between quarks and little comes from the Higgs mass of the quarks is not understanding what a Higgs field might look like. If you believe in equivalence, all forms of mass are equivalent. This would imply that the binding energy between quarks must interact with the higgs field to resist acceleration as well the "quark masses" (whatever the hell that means, I assume that means rest mass of a quark).
I mean, unless you want to, you know, use pascal or fortran or something.
Although "C" compiles down really very close to the metal, so does "C++" (and a host of other more modern languages). However, it's not that easy to take that next step to the metal. In between is a machine that virtualizes the registers (using register renaming techinques), virtualizes the memory (using difficult to predict caching, translation, and ordering operations), and reorders the instructions (speculation, branch target hiding, etc), and runs in a sandbox (under the os which is timeslicing between tasks and faulting and swapping in memory translations and maybe even simulating some instructions).
Knowing what the machine is actually doing is often a mythical quest down the rabbit hole. Although I'm a big fan of "C+" (what I call the c++ subset that doesn't have all the crapola that I don't use**), I'm under no illusion that all you are really doing with C is using a more predictable translation strategy (e.g., static compile time translation) rather than some magical "metal" commanding language.
** +objects, +const, +templates, +-stl (some are okay), -overloading, -virtual inheritance, -rtti, -boost, etc...
IANAL, but the structure of many multi-national corporations are weird and complicated. The easiest way I've found to think about it is to treat multi-nationals as a big family with a super-patriarch/matriarch instead of thinking of a multi-national as a single person.
For example, generally, in each country a multi-national generally sets up it's own division of the company which is chartered to do business in that location, which is usually structured as a mostly owned subsidiary of the parent company. The reason to do this is to satisfy the laws of that host country w/o imposing them on the parent company (e.g., ownership requirements, employment requirements, tax requirements, etc).
Of course once you set up a bunch of these companies in different juristictions, now you can play all sorts of games. The biggest game that is played is the income tax shell game (moving income into companies that have the lowest tax rate). The other big game is to hid parent company liability for big disasters and legal lawsuits (parent company was just an investor in the local company).
In China, they often require a certain percentage of chinese ownership or key employees for certain types of companies, and it's likely that this is why taiwanese Proview set up this china subsidiary in the first place. It's not inconcievable that the trademark on iPad needed to be registered in china and they chose to have the local company do that registration instead of the parent company in taiwan for legal reasons (they might not recognize the taiwan trademark law in china). Of course, it retrospect, that seemed like a brilliant decision, but I'm guessing they just did it by accident.
Okay, I'll bite (I assume you know how to google, so this is probably just bait)...
1. The PPACA was structured as an insurance mandate instead of single payer was that it is politically unpopular in the US to nationalize industries (even the health insurance industry). People in the US seem to want choice. In the US generally the government isn't expected to force people to BUY something (AFAIK, nowhere in the US you have to go to drivers school to get a drivers licence). On the otherhand, there is Medicare (essentially a "forced" premium single-payer for elderly folks), but even then there are Medicare Supplimental policies that can be purchased from private parties for people to get their "choices".
2. HMO (health maintenance organization) a corporation that is chartered with a special legal carveout. The primary feature of the HMO corporation that is allowed to sell insurance and provide services for patients. The reason that an HMO isn't just a normal insurance corporation is that they have an inherent conflict of interest between the premium collection side and the patient's best interests (given the doctor is employed by the same company), which needs some legal exemptions (in exchange for more regulation). In this context, think about an HMO being analogous to a local version of a nationalized health service (the same entity collects the taxes and provides the services), except that being private, it can't force people to join.
3. I don't think USAns think that corporations are somehow more moral (or have their best interests at heart) than the government, just that they are probably very similar, so that's a false choice you are presenting. However, there's a vague idea that it's easier to find a new corporation to do business if you don't like them with than to find a new government (w/o moving to another country) and that's often why private options seem more compelling than government options (although in reality, they are mostly similar in the long run).
Chief Justice Roberts: “It Is Not Our Job to Protect the People From the Consequences of Their Political Choices”
There you go... bring on the consequences!
So who's job is it to look out for the best interests of the country? Is that one of those mystery jobs that Americans just don't want to do?
Yep. It is the American voter's job to look out for the best interests of the country. So apparently it is one of those mystery jobs that Americans just don't want to do. Since Mr. Robert's and the rest of SCOTUS is appointed, he is quite correct, it is not his job to protect people from the consequences of their political choices...
Because a lot of younger, healthier people are now going to be buying in, costs may actually come DOWN.
Unfortunatly, since many low-cost insurance options that younger, healthier people have been buying have been eliminated (don't meet new minimum coverage requirements, deductibles are too high), it is likely to be a wash...
Ultimately, the only answer is a single-payer system. As long as you have private companies in the insurance business, there is a perverse incentive to screw their customers over.
Sadly, as long as you have private companies, there are generally some choices. With the government single payer system, there will likely not be much choice. E.g., like social security you get "billed" 12.4%, you can't choose a lower amount for lower benefits if you dont' think you need them.
People whine and complain about government's incompetence, and I'd never say there's no waste or that government is perfect. However, I trust government a hell of a lot more than I trust the insurance industry, which has proven time and again that they're scum.
Actually I think both are quite scummy, but with the incentives in place today it is more likely that insurance companies will pay nice (now there are minimum loss ratios, although unforunatly, they are only 85%). Given the NHS in other countries, I'm not so sure that the government would have any incentive to maintain a loss ratio less than 200% (meaning they'd divert general revenue to pay for healthcare) which seems unsustainable to me...
So yes, it is a tax on dumb/irresponsible people.
When I hear stuff like this I just shake my head. Sadly, the CBO has estimated that this will likely be a highly regressive tax. Sure, the "poor" are exempt from this tax/penalty, but as I mentioned in a previous post, the low-income folks that work for small employers get hit the hardest by this tax/penalty.
Either they can't responisbly afford the minimally compliant insurance to avoid the tax and just end up paying the tax (which is scaled down to be proportional to income so they can afford the tax), or their employer will have decided it's cheaper for them to pay the penalty and stop offering minimally compliant insurance to their employees which puts them into this boat as well. The CBO estimates about 4Million people will fall into this category.
Sure the tax will his some dumb and irresponsible people as well, but sadly as drafted, it will also make that step from welfare to self-dependence, that much higher... On balance, I think it's okay, but lets not call these 4M folks dumb/irresponsible. Sometimes people have to make responsible choices for their family between paying for safe food/shelter and paying some dumb tax. I hope to never be "dumb" enough to be in that situation.
Bullshit. The tax is only on those who refuse to get insurance. That will be an infinitisimally small number of Americans.
The current CBO estimates are that 4 Million people will likely choose to pay the IRS rather than purchase insurance. The rationale for this is that the penalty/tax for not being insured is dependent on income. For low-income folks who work for an employer that does not provide health insurance***, it may be significantly cheaper to just pay the penalty/tax than to purchase the minimially qualifying insurance to be exempted from being penalized.
4M/400M is about 1% which is small, but not "infinitisimally" small (depending on how you define the word) considering that there is currently estimated to be 30M uninsured today, and only 25M uninsured when all the provisions of the new healthcare act have been deployed which only has a 5M gap (including 400K 19-25yro folks eligible for the new under26child provision). Under this definition, only an "infinitisimally" small number of Americans will gain insurance under this act. Depending on your politics, you may like this definition of "infinitisimal"...
In any case, I personally think it is generally a good thing for people to have health insurance, but unfortuantly as designed it greatly increases the "step" between being state dependent (e.g., on welfare, etc), and being self supporting (e.g, either you or your employer purchasing your health insurance for you). I think that was on purpose for 2 reasons: it's expensive to close this gap, and the authors want to create a vaccuum where nationalized health care can grow. Witness the proposed expansion of medicare to support families with children (forcing states to accept this expansion was ruled unconsitutional in this same SCOTUS ruling).
*** in addition to the small business exclusion, because of the new definition of minimally qualifying insurance, it is estimated that some employers will find it cheaper to join the current crop of non-insurers and pay the fine rather than to increase their coverage to the minimial qualifying amount. This increase in coverage cost is primarly due to several provisions of the act such as the removal of the annual and lifetime limits...